Page 167 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 1

CPS1254 Yu Jin et al.

The measurement of inequality of
opportunity in China
Yu Jin, Ni Wendong
School of Statistics, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics,Dalian ,China

Abstract
Based on the data of China General Social Survey from 2003 to 2013 and a
review of the existing methods of inequality of quantitative measurement
opportunities, this paper uses parametric and no-parametric methods to
quantitatively measure the degree of opportunity inequality and its changing
trend of income inequality in China. The results reveal that the inequality of
opportunity which the China's residents are suffering in the process of
obtaining income is increasingly serious, and the inequality of opportunity is
rising faster than income inequality, at the same time, the influence of
individual' efforts on the income is becoming increasingly weak.

Keywords
Inequality of Opportunity; parameter method; no-parameter method;
Changing Trend

1. Introduction
With the continuous development of China's economy and society, the
residents' income has achieved steady growth. But the income gap is still large
and unable to be solved, the Gini coefficient of the income remains high.
According to the data released by the National Bureau of statistics, the Gini
coefficient has been above 0.44 of the global average since 2003. In 2016, the
Gini coefficient of China's resident income was 0.465, and 0.4 is usually taken
as a warning line in the world. More than 0.4 indicate that the income gap is
large. Thus, there has been a very serious problem of unequal income
distribution in our country. Income inequality causes residents to "hate rich"
mentality, which leads to rising crime rate and social unrest. At the same time,
excessive income inequality will affect economic growth, and even more
serious will lead to political instability.
The Central Committee of the party and the State Council attaches great
importance to the issue of income distribution, and has repeatedly proposed
to focus on solving the problem of excessive income gap, thus forming a
reasonable distribution pattern of income, which will benefit the people all
over the country more fairly and truly realize the goal of common prosperity
for the whole people. Based on this "big environment", income distribution
has always been a hot topic for domestic scholars. In recent years, the trend

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