China's Regions

This paper seeks to address the causes of growing income inequality between China’s coastal and interior regions in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since the late 1970s, China’s coastal regions have experienced rapid growth rates. Compared with these coastal areas, however, inland regions do not seem to have been as successful. Between 1978 and 1993, the ratio of mean GDP per capita between coastal and noncoastal regions grew from 2.53 to 2.82. Poverty in inland areas is …

…or Deng Xiaoping’s coastal favoritism, policy decisions have primarily determined the general focus of China’s development strategies. Kanbur and Zhang finding that coastal-inland income gaps have been increasing faster than rural-urban inequalities from 1983 to 1995 reinforces the notion that region-specific forces existed in that period. Trends in Inequality Recently, the central government has made attempts to reduce coastal-noncoastal inequality with policies promoting investment in inland provinces, focusing especially on township and village enterprises (TVE).