The Difference Between Heaven and Earth: Urban-rural Disparities in Health and Well-being in China

Abstract

[evdate 2010-10-29] Institute for Advanced Study Distinguished Lecture on Inequality and Poverty.Abstract: Although China is a rapidly developing nation, rural-urban disparities in health and well-being remain large, and perhaps have become larger than in the early years of the Communist period because the urban sector has benefitted from China’s transition to a market economy much more than has the rural sector, or perhaps have been reduced through the infusion of income into the rural sector as a result of massive labor migration and resulting remittances. Economic disparities are exacerbated by institutional arrangements that have created a two-class society with sharp rural-urban distinctions in the public provision of schooling, health care, housing, and retirement benefits. Indeed, it is fair to say that China built an urban welfare state on the backs of the peasants. The speaker's paper will describe rural-urban disparities in health and well-being and will analyze whether, to what extent, and in what ways such disparities have changed over time. The speaker also will consider to what extent changes over the life course in health and well-being reflect geographical and social mobility, which has been massive: fully 40% of the formal urban population in 2008—the population with urban registration— changed from rural to urban registration between age 14 and the time they were surveyed, many if not most because their change in registration status accompanied marked upward mobility. (Note that the proportion of the current rural-origin population able to acquire urban status is quite small, about 13%, but because the rural population was far larger than the urban population, the small faction of successful rural-origin hukou-changers constitutes a much larger fraction of the registered urban population.)To carry out this analysis, the speaker will exploit two national probability sample surveys he carried out in China, one in 1996 and one in 2008, supplemented by data from various Chinese censuses and by data from sample surveys carried out by others. Duration: 84 min.