Which regional inequality? The evolution of rural-urban and inland-coastalinequality in China from 1983 to 1995

This paper develops a unified empirical framework for describing the relati ve contribution of rural-urban and inland-coastal inequality to overall reg ional inequality in China during the 1980's and 1990's. The framework asses ses rural-urban and inland-coastal inequalities from the same data set, pre sents results for a sufficiently long time period to transcend short-term f luctuations, allows for differential price changes, and applies a consisten t notion of the contribution to inequality using a decomposition analysis. While the contribution of rural-urban inequality is much higher than that o f inland-coastal inequality in terms of levels, the trend is very different . The rural-urban contribution has not changed very much over time, but the inland-coastal contribution has increased by several fold. The paper ends by investigating the role of labor migration in this outcome. (C) 1999 Acad emic Press.