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For example, the party built most of the industrial plants, under the Soviet help, in inland areas instead of coastal areas, and the former treaty ports were not prioritized in the First five-year plan. [101] Such efforts to level spatial inequality continued during the Great Leap Forward, but the regional inequality persisted.
Spatial inequality refers to the unequal distribution of income and resources across geographical regions. [1] Attributable to local differences in infrastructure, [2] geographical features (presence of mountains, coastlines, particular climates, etc.) and economies of agglomeration, [3] such inequality remains central to public policy discussions regarding economic inequality more broadly.
Traditional political ideology promotes merit-based inequality. Official propaganda emphasizes that economic development requires some people to get rich first, and the resulting inequality is the price this society pays for development. [6] China's traditional political consciousness promotes inequality based on performance.
Thus, while political attempts have been made to empower women, cultural and economic traditions fuel gender discrimination in China. However, while many authors highlight the evidence for gender inequality, other scholars find opposite results claiming that Chinese society does not favor men.
In a landmark paper published in the Review of Development Economics, economists Ravi Kanbur and Xiaobo Zhang conclude that there have been three peaks of inequality in China in the last fifty years, "coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, and finally the period of openness and global integration in the late 1990s."
Amartya Sen noticed that in China, rapid economic development went together with worsening female mortality and higher sex ratios. [12] [13] Although China has been traditionally discriminatory against women, a significant decline in China's female population happened after 1979, the year following implementation of economic and social reforms under Deng Xiaoping. [12]
Globally, the issue of spatial inequality is largely a result of disparities between urban and rural areas. A study commissioned by the United Nations University WIDER project has shown that for the twenty-six countries included in the study, spatial inequalities have been high and on the increase, especially for developing nations.
Inequality between urban and rural areas, and where rural poverty is most prevalent, is in countries where the adult population has the lowest amount of education. [26] This was found in the Sahelian countries of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger where regional inequality is 33 percent, 19.4 percent, and 21.3 percent, respectively. In each of these ...