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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, September 30, 2002

Economic Growth Churns out Richer Urbanites

For most Chinese, the around two-digit average annual gross domestic product growth of China's economy since 1978 may be too intangible for them to conjure up quite much. But a clear fact is that they are getting richer, at least for urban households.


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For most Chinese, the around two-digit average annual gross domestic product growth of China's economy since 1978 may be too intangible for them to conjure up quite much.

But a clear fact is that they are getting richer. This is the case at least for urban households.

A recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that by June of this year, the average property of urban households has come to a value worth 228,300 yuan (US$27,606), an unimaginable figure before China started its opening-up and reform drive in 1978 when 10,000 yuan (US$1,209) in cash would be so much as to send one into the rank of "millionaires".

Of the total urban family property, the financial assets of each household are 79,800 yuan (US$9,649), of which 92.4 percent is domestic currency, the remaining are foreign exchanges.

From 1984 to June in this year, the financial assets of urban households rise by 25.5 percent per year, according to the NBS survey based on a poll covering 3,997 urban families in small-, medium- and big-sized cities sampled out of seven provinces and Tianjin, the coastal provincial-level city directly under the central government's administration.

Of the components of the urban households' total property, the real estate slices off the biggest share, which is 47.9 percent or 109,400 yuan (US$13,229) on average. The financial assets take a share of 34.9 percent, household businesses 12.2 percent, and the durable household appliances 5 percent.

As for the way urban families choose to manage their financial assets, the vast majority seems to prefer to put them in banks. As a result, savings accounts make up nearly 70 percent of their financial possessions.

The runners-up are all kinds of stocks and securities, which constitute 10 percent. The third form of financial assets in urban families is the 4.4 percent of treasury bonds, while the remaining includes saving insurances, housing deposits and other forms of bonds.

Some analysts attribute the bulk share of savings accounts in urban families to the lack of investment options: Except the risky and overly manipulated stock market, there seems to be no other substitute portfolios.

But in most sense, this is for the high degree of uncertainties before them, according to the NBS.

Medical and old-age care, housing, children's education and the insecure employment all force urban households to save more.

Based on the survey, the NBS thinks the wealth distribution and the mechanism behind it in nowadays China is still rational and efficient. But the comments seem to be downplaying, at least in the eyes of some researchers, the income or wealth gap in present China.

In the survey, the ratio of the disposable income of the 10 percent high-income group to that of the 10 percent low-income group is 5 to 1. But in 1988, the figure was only 3.1 to 1.

As for the income disparity between cities and countryside, the difference is much larger.

According to a research by the China's Center for Economic Research at Beijing University, of all factors leading to income disparity in current China, the economic difference between the urban and rural areas is the No. 1.

With their usually self-built houses and the collective-owned farming land, farmers can barely be considered to have the property in the name of real estate.

As for their cash income, it is usually about 30 percent of their urban counterparts'.



By PD Online staff Forest Lee


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