This paper presents a comprehensive picture of China's regional inequality from 1952 to 1999 using newly released data on consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) at the provincial level. Although there are many studies on regional inequality in China, this paper is the first attempt to evaluate regional inequalities before and after the economic reforms for a time span of almost half a century. Our results show that inter-regional inequality widens over time, either measured by per capita GDP or consumption expenditures, and either in the pre-reform or the post-reform period. The results also show that the choice of GDP or consumption as an indicator of economic welfare matters in regional inequality analysis. Per capita GDP is more unequally distributed than per capita consumption.

The existence of geo-economic clubs must meet two conditions. First, per capita output within each club converges to a long-term stationary state. Second, per capita output between clubs diverges so that the rich become richer and the poor poorer. This paper proposes a production model to explain club divergence and uses both the unit root test and the decomposition of an inequality index to prove the existence of geo-economic clubs among the Chinese provinces based on real per capita GDP data from 1952 to 1997. The results reflect a serious problem of regional inequality and growth divergence in contemporary China. J. Comp. Econ., September 2001, 29 (3), pp. 466-484. University of Middlesex, London NW4 4BT; and University of Chongqing, China.

This paper presents a comprehensive picture of inequality in China on the basis of provincial data. It decomposes overall inequalities into intra and inter components. Rural-urban inequality dominated overall inequality in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Meanwhile, in recent years inter-regional inequality has grown rapidly and become an important component of inequality. We find that the pattern of inequality is quite different in the pre-reform and reform periods. Our results show that overall inequality in China is large by international standards and that it has grown worse during the past half century.

This paper investigates convergence patterns among China's provinces using GDP data for the period 1952-97. We use the Markov chains proposed by Quah (1993) and the generalized entropy decomposition approach proposed by Shorrocks (1980, 1984) to analyse the convergence behaviour. Both sets of results show similar evidence of convergence within the predefined geo-economic sub-regions, but no evidence of convergence between the sub-regions. The finding has important policy implications on regional economic development in China.

This article uses both cross-section and panel data approaches to staay regional growth in China Inter-regional income inequality increased (O divergence), the rich regions became richer but poor regionspoorer (βdivergence), over the data period 1978-95 This contradicts resultsfrom 0ther cross-region country studies shownby Sala-i-Martin [1996] and some earlier studies on China Only after controlling for regional effects, population growth, and investment in both physical and human capital do the data show significant β-convergence More interestingb, the degree of openness and transportation are two other important factors responsiblefor differences in regional growth. This finding has important implications for regional development policy.