Income Inequality and Urban-Rural Migration

Inequality, the Urban-Rural Gap and Migration

Using population and product consumption data from the Demographic and Health Surveys I construct comparable measures of inequality and migration for 65 countries, including some of the poorest countries in the world. I find that the urban-rural gap accounts for 40% of mean country inequality and much of its cross-country variation. One out of every four or five individuals raised in rural area...

The Impact of Urban and Rural Income Inequality on Natural Gas Consumption: The Case of Iran

T he environmental issues have received a lot of attention in recent years. Since environmental pollution is one of the issues that may damage the ability of future generations, it is important to examine the determinants of the environment quality. The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of urban and rural income inequality on natural gas consumption in Iran. To this...

The Urban-Rural Gap and Income Inequality in China

The Urban-Rural Income Gap and Inequality in China

Using new household survey data for 1995 and 2002, we investigate the size of China’s urban-rural income gap, the gap’s contribution to overall inequality in China, and the factors underlying the gap. Our analysis improves on past estimates by using a fuller measure of income, adjusting for spatial price differences and including migrants. Our methods include inequality decomposition by populat...

Effects of Government Policies on Urban and Rural Income Inequality

We use three conventional inequality indices—the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income—and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981 to 1997. We find that these progra...