Is China's Regional Disparity Widening?

Abstract

The fastest economic growth in China occurred in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in these years. The economic growth of Shanghai was the fourth worst in the first half of 2005 in China. If this trend continues in the future, we can identify that China’s regional income disparity has shifted from the divergence stage to the convergence stage as theorized by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of the ‘rich-first’. In other words, China is now moving towards the economic growth stage for the poor people from the economic growth stage just only for the rich people.