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Child Income Poverty Levels and Trends in Urban China from 1989 to 2011

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Abstract

This paper fills the existing knowledge gap by examining the changes in the extent and nature of child poverty in urban China between 1989 and 2011, and contributes to the literature by using the relative income approach, different from the absolute income approach used in many previous studies. All waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey Data (CHNS) is used including the newest 2011 survey. Both the anchored and current relative poverty lines were constructed in this paper. In addition, the FGT index introduced by Foster et al. (Econometrica 52(3), 761–766, 1984) is used to measure income poverty gaps and inequalities. The findings show that income distribution has been unequal and the income gap has widened during the study period. Although China has achieved great economic growth since economic reform, the lower income group benefited much less from China's fast economic growth compared with the middle or higher income groups. The findings of this paper imply that policy makers need to pay more attention in future on reducing income inequality in urban China.

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Notes

  1. The NBS provide urban residents’ Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is used as a deflator to adjust the anchored poverty lines. The official CPI calculated by the National Bureau Statistics (http://www.stats.gov.cn) includes 262 categories of commodities and prices of services, which are summarised into eight groups: food, clothes, alcohol and cigarettes, health, shelter, transport and communications, entertainment, education and cultural goods and services, household consumer durables and services.

  2. Table 1 shows that the anchored poverty line in 1989 is 1251 yuan while 50 % median current poverty line is 1196 yuan. These two poverty lines are slightly different, and this is because not totally overlapping of the two variables, i.e., hhinc_cp and hhinc used in the estimations of these two poverty lines. The household income variable used for setting the median poverty lines in the CHNS data is hhinc_cp, i.e., the median poverty lines. For estimating the anchored line, the variable used in the CHNS dataset is hhinc (total net hh income without adjustment using cpi).

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). We thank the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety, Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Carolina Population Centre, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the NIH (R01-HD30880, DK056350, and R01-HD38700) and the Fogarty International Centre, NIH for financial support for the CHNS data collection and analysis files since 1989 and both parties plus the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Ministry of Health for support for CHNS 2009. The authors are also grateful to two referees for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, School of Public Administration, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Di Qi

  2. Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

    Yichao Wu

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  1. Di Qi
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Correspondence to Di Qi.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 2 The changes in CPI-adjusted and equivalised household income by different child income groups between 1989 and 2011
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Qi, D., Wu, Y. Child Income Poverty Levels and Trends in Urban China from 1989 to 2011. Child Ind Res 9, 1043–1058 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-015-9351-1

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