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Is China’s regional inequality ethnic inequality?

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Abstract

What is the relevant geographic unit for the study of comparative economic development and regional inequality? Recent research suggests the importance of traditional ethnic homelands as a unit of study, and the relevance of geo-climactic features in shaping the contours of these homelands. I assess the relevance of ethnic homelands in understanding China’s persistent regional inequality. I estimate spatial Gini coefficients for nighttime lights emissions across five different levels of spatial aggregation: provinces, counties, a 2.5 by 2.5 decimal degree grid, traditional ethnic homelands and perturbed ethnic homelands (which retain the centroid of traditional homelands but have altered borders). Across multiple specifications and 21 years of nighttime lights data, I find inequality is highest at the traditional ethnic homeland level. Subsequent analyses show that inequality in precipitation levels and the caloric suitability of land are also highest at the ethnic homeland level, suggesting that ethnic inequality reflects in part systematic differences in the quality of agricultural land across the traditional homelands of Han and non-Han ethnicities.

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Notes

  1. I employ the stable nighttime lights dataset, which has been pre-processed to remove ephemeral lights emanating from the aurora borealis, forest fires, etc. Data are available to download via http://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp.html.

  2. Province and county-level territories are as defined by the GADM databases of Global Administrative Areas (www.gadm.org). Population data is from the Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 (CIESIN 2016).

  3. Ruggedness and elevation data are from the China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS), Fairbank Center (2016). Precipitation data is from WorldClim—Global Climate Data (Fick and Hijmans 2017). See Galor and Özak (2015, 2016) for a description of and links to the caloric suitability data.

  4. Gini indices calculated using Stata’s ineqdeco command (Jenkins 2015). At the ethnic homeland level of aggregation, analyses are weighted by size of homeland, meaning that larger homeland income levels count for more in calculations than do those of smaller homelands.

  5. The boundaries of these coloured bins are unaltered from their default values in ArcMap.

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  1. Social Science Program, Cégep Heritage College, Gatineau, QC, Canada

    Paul Minard

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Minard, P. Is China’s regional inequality ethnic inequality?. Lett Spat Resour Sci 13, 297–314 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12076-020-00260-3

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