Essays on rising income inequality and quality of life in contemporary China

The primary contribution of the thesis is to propose the idea of collaboration from self efforts and social efforts to promote well-being in the research area of income inequality. The literature merely concerns the effect of income inequality on well-being based on social efforts which reflect on the measurement of income inequality according to social comparison. The thesis argues that this unilateral examination is unable to achieve coherence and unity between theory and empirical structure with respect to individual well-being and its corresponding statistical evidence is likely biased. Hence, the thesis introduces the new two-effort framework which enables a comprehensive and fair evaluation of social efforts such as government assistance and action on the issue of inequality.
Through the application of such an idea into the analysis of China’s income inequality, the thesis has the following unprejudiced conclusions. China’s economy has retained strong growth over the past decades. Yet, the road to relieve the parallel outcome of rising income inequality from the robust growth is not optimistic. There is appreciable government policy on living standards in the short run but unfortunately, sustainable government intervention is scarce. This claim is drawn from three investigations of inequality by: i) examining the returns on social efforts and self efforts with respect to income inequality on living standards; ii) the influence of economic opportunity and security on individual income inequality; and iii), a case study of social efforts, government policy, particularly focusing on residential electricity pricing on household life burden.