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Income gap between rich and poor soars in China

China's income gap continued to widen in the first quarter of the year with 10 percent of the nation's richest enjoying 45 percent of the country's wealth, state press reports said yesterday.

China's poorest 10 percent only had 1.4 percent of the nation's wealth, Xinhua news agency reported, citing a recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The survey, which polled 54,000 urban and rural households, found China's richest 10 percent had disposable income 11.8 times greater than the lowest 10 percent at the end of the first quarter of this year.

This compares with the rich having disposable income 10.9 times greater than the poorest 10 percent during the same period last year, the report said.

However, income continued to grow both among the rich and the poor during the first quarter, with the richest 10 percent seeing disposable income rising 15.7 percent over the same period last year to 8,880 yuan (US$1,072), it said.

Disposable income for the lowest 10 percent rose 7.6 percent from the first quarter of last year to 755 yuan. Disposable income in China grew by 11.3 percent on average during the period, but only 8.6 percent when inflation was factored in, while a notable disparity between urban and rural incomes also widened, it said.

China's Gini coefficient, or an internationally accepted measurement of income equality was calculated to be over the "alarm level" of 0.4, where zero corresponds to complete equality and one refers to perfect inequality, or one person having all the income, it said.

No precise Gini coefficient was provided, but recent state press reports said the value was more than 0.48 and approaching 0.5.

Most developed European nations tend to have coefficients of between 0.24 and 0.36 while the US has been above 0.4 for several decades, according to UN 2004 Human Development Report, which calculated China's value last year at 0.447.
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