From Financial Times:
China’s poor grew poorer at a time when the country was growing substantially wealthier, an analysis by World Bank economists has found.
The real income of the poorest 10 per cent of China’s 1.3bn people fell by 2.4 per cent in the two years to 2003, the analysis showed, a period when the economy was growing by nearly 10 per cent a year. Over the same period, the income of China’s richest 10 per cent rose by more than 16 per cent.
“Preliminary analysis on Chinese data indicates that average income of the bottom decile went down slightly between 2001 and 2003, whereas all other income categories saw significant increases,” said Bert Hofman, the bank’s lead economist in China.[Full Text]
Related article from The Wall Street Journal:”In China, Growth at Whose Cost?” says”The success of China’s transformation into a manufacturing powerhouse has allowed Beijing to dismiss criticism of the downside of Chinese-style economic reform: a dismal environmental record, a repressive political climate and the breakdown of the country’s health-care system.”
