Income Inequality in Transitional Urban China The Effect of.pdfVIP

Sociology Mind 2012. Vol.2, No.4, 373-381 Published Online October 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/sm) /10.4236/sm.2012.24049 Income Inequality in Transitional Urban China: The Effect of Market versus State Qiong Wu, Barry Goetz, David Hartmann, Yuan-Kang Wang Department of Sociology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA Email: qiong.wu@ Received July 2nd th th , 2012; revised August 4 , 2012; accepted August 13 , 2012 The rise of inequality in China is one of the most serious social problems in the reform era in China. Pre- vious studies have debated the relative importance of human capital, political capital, and other factors in determining personal income. Using a new dataset from 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS, 2006), the first author replicates earlier tests to measure whether the market or state has more impact on incomes as a way to the competing hypotheses related to human versus political capital. The results of the ordinary least squares regression analysis show no significance in party membership, state ownership, and work experience, while the first author does find high returns to education, which supports Nee’s market transi- tion theory. Moreover, the findings indicate that market sectors, including domestic private enterprises and foreign enterprises have remarkable advanta