ABSTRACT
This paper aims to document and explain China’s record against poverty over the two decades following Deng Xiaoping’s initiation of pro-market reforms in 1978. We apply new poverty lines to newly assembled distributional data – much of which has not previously been analyzed – and we address some of the data problems that have clouded past estimates and point to some continuing concerns about the data. We thus aim to offer the longest and most internally consistent series of national poverty and inequality measures, spanning 1980-2001. While data are less complete at the provincial level, we can estimate trends since the mid-1980s.
