ABSTRACT
Two things are striking: first, remarkable income disparities among the rural population in Ningxia exist, and those disparities are widening. Intraprovincial development in Ningxia is highly uneven. Disparities reduced in the 1980s, but rose again dramatically in the 1990s. In 1997, the average rural net income per capita in the Southern Mountains Region was only 58 per cent of the province’s average (1,545.08 Rmb), and only 43 per cent of the nation’s average (2,090.10 Rmb). 11 What Wang and Hu found out for the provincial level-widening income disparities-is also true for the intraprovincial development in Ningxia. Second, in 1995 it was hardly above the official poverty line at that time of 500 Rmb.
