By IANS,
Beijing : China last year recorded its widest rural-urban income gap since the nation launched its reform policy in 1978 and an expert warned that the gap would “continue to expand as the country focuses its efforts on urban sprawl, rather than rural development”, a media report said Tuesday.
The urban per capita net income stood at 17,175 yuan ($2,525) last year, in contrast to 5,153 yuan in the countryside, China Daily reported Tuesday citing the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.
The daily’s calculations showed that last year saw China’s widest urban-rural income gap in the past 32 years.
“I am afraid the (urban-rural) income gap will continue to expand as the country focuses its efforts on urban sprawl, rather than rural development,” Song Hongyuan, director of the Research Center for the Rural Economy in the Ministry of Agriculture, was quoted as saying.
Song Xiaowu, president of the China Society of Economic Reform, said the huge urban-rural income gap has partly resulted in China’s increasingly “appalling income disparity between the haves and have-nots”.
Song observed that the wealth gap was due to low wages for employees and migrants in many companies, as well as rapidly growing profits for the management of state-owned enterprises, real estate developers and some private companies.
Chi Fulin, president of the Hainan-based China Institute for Reform and Development, said: “To boost domestic consumption, I am urgently expecting the government to announce a programme to double people’s per capita income in five years.”