Changing trends in China’s inequality: evidence, analysis, and prospects
Changing trends in China’s inequality: evidence, analysis, and prospects
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DOI：
10.1080/15387216.2021.1988863
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发表时间：
2021-10
影响因子：
3.8
通讯作者：
Marten Loopmans
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Marten Loopmans
中国为减少贫困和不平等所做的努力在国内外引起了广泛讨论。在经历了30年几乎持续的两位数经济增长之后，中国不仅在经济实力方面，而且越来越多地提供了一种替代的社会和政治模式，成为了美国霸权的强大挑战者。因此，中国的经济和社会政策吸引了全世界的政治和学术关注。在关于“中国模式”的争论中，中国日益加剧的不平等成为焦点，因为这似乎与中国的社会主义雄心相矛盾。中国今天的不平等水平处于光谱的高端；远远高于欧洲标准，可与美国或印度相媲美(韩、赵薇和张2016)。更重要的是，随着中国的经济自由化，不平等程度迅速上升，扰乱了内部舆论，并引起了外部观察家的关注。然而，自十多年前以来，不平等似乎已经达到了顶峰。这本书着眼于收入不平等在2007年至2013年之间的“转折”(在2008年达到顶峰)，试图细致入微地阐述、阐述但也解释了这些变化。基于具有全国代表性的中国家庭收入项目(CHIP)的数据，作者当然没有评估随后的重要政策变化。CHIP的最新调查记录了2013年的情况。例如，在过去的十年里，中国既发展了雄心勃勃的社会住房计划(史、陈、王2016)，也发展了史无前例的三权分置改革(王、张2017)，刺激了农村土地市场化，可以预期，这两者都将在2013年后对中国的收入和财富分配产生相当大的影响。尽管如此，该书对2007年至2013年关键变革时期不平等及其前因后果的详细分析，仍然使该书对《中国》中关于发展与不平等的辩论做出了重大贡献。正如一本不少于23名撰稿人的编辑卷所预期的那样，中国的不平等中的变化趋势并没有呈现出一个连贯的故事。将这些文章联系在一起的是，它们都使用相同的数据库来处理不平等的维度和方面。此外，每一章基本上都遵循相同的格式。一个典型的章节从概述问题开始，然后是关于这个主题的文献的简短概述。随后，讨论了所使用的数据和方法，并对结果进行了说明和解释。这种标准化的格式使这本书有时有点重复，尽管它确实有助于消化经常详细和详细的分析。由于缺少最后一章，
China’s efforts to reduce poverty and inequality are widely debated, both within and outside the country. After three decades of nearly constant double-digit economic growth, China has become a formidable challenger to the US hegemony, not only in terms of economic power but increasingly also for offering an alternative social and political model. Consequently, China’s economic and social policies attract political and academic attention all over the world.In the debates about the “Chinese model”, the country’s rising inequality has figured centrally, as it seems to contradict China’s socialist ambitions. China’s level of inequality today is at the high end of the spectrum; well above European standards, and comparable with the USA or India (Han, Zhao, and Zhang 2016). What’s more, inequality has been rising rapidly with China’s economic liberalization, troubling internal public opinion, and raising attention from external observers. Since a bit more than a decade ago, however, inequality seems to have reached its maximum. Zooming in on the period between 2007 and 2013, when income inequality “took a turn”(having peaked in 2008), this book seeks to nuance, elaborate but also explain these changes. Building on the nationally representative data of the China Household Income Project (CHIP), whose latest survey documents the situation in 2013, the authors of course fail to evaluate the important policy changes that came after. In the past decade for example, China has developed both an ambitious social housing program (Shi, Chen, and Wang 2016), as well as an unprecedented “reform of three rights separation”(Wang and Zhang 2017), stimulating rural land marketization, both of which can be expected to have had considerable effects on the distribution of income and wealth in China after 2013. Nonetheless, the volume’s detailed analysis of inequality, its causes and effects in the crucial period of change between 2007 and 2013, still makes this book a major contribution to the debate on development and inequality in China. As can be expected of an edited volume with no less than 23 contributors, Changing Trends in China’s Inequality does not present a single coherent story. What ties together the articles is that they all use the same database to address dimensions and aspects of inequality. Also, each chapter largely follows the same format. A typical chapter starts by sketching the problem, after which a short overview of the literature on the subject is presented. Subsequently, data and methods used are discussed, and results are presented and interpreted. This standardized format makes the book a bit repetitive at times, although it does help digesting the often detailed and elaborate analyses. Lacking a concluding chapter, the