ABSTRACT
Since China’s economy entered the takeoff stage in 1978, the average growth rate of per capita GDP has been as high as 8.1 percent. As Amartya Sen has analyzed, in the past two decades China’s economy has been developing very rapidly. The growth of China’s income per capita is much faster than that of any other region in the world. Nevertheless, people have always failed to realize that this is rather astounding for such a large country as China. It’s totally different from those well-known countries or regions with rapid economic growth such as Hong Kong and Singapore. Unlike China, which has a very large rural population, Hong Kong and Singapore are actually cities. It is an extraordinary achievement for such a large country with dramatic regional differences to achieve such a high average growth rate.2 Meanwhile, China’s rural impoverished population has decreased by a large margin. According to China’s national poverty line, the rural impoverished population has dropped from 250 million in 1978 to 28.2 million in 2002, decreasing by 88.7 percent. The impoverished population has decreased by an average of 9.24 million per year (see Table 5.1). According to the international poverty line, at which the cost of living per capita per day is below $1, the World Bank estimates that China’s rural impoverished population has dropped from 280 million in 1990 to 124 million in 1997, decreasing by 55.7 percent. The impoverished population has decreased by an average of 22.29 million per year (see Table 5.2). These different estimates demonstrate that while China is the country with the largest population and the largest impoverished population, it has made unprecedented achievements in poverty reduction.
