Abstract
In this chapter we examine the incomes of employees in China’s rural enterprises, often referred to as township, village and private enterprises (TVPs). This rapidly growing group — now numbering almost 100 million — occupies an intermediate position between the highly regulated urban wage employment sector, on the one hand, and the mass of rural peasant household producers, on the other. We begin with the macroeconomic context, showing the crucial role that rural enterprise employment now plays in absorbing the increment to the rural labour force. In the second section we present estimates of income functions for the rural enterprise sector, using data from the 1988 survey. The third and fourth sections are comparative: we compare the income functions of rural and urban wage employees, and rural households receiving income from enterprise employment with other rural households. We also investigate access to rural enterprise employment. The final section contains a summary and conclusions.
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Notes and references
Support from the Leverhulme Trust is gratefully acknowledged.
Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC), State Statistical Bureau (SSB), Statistical Yearbook of China, 1990, 1990, Bei**g (in Chinese), p. 357.
Ibid, p. 128.
Surveyed by Jeffrey R. Taylor, ‘Rural Employment Trends and the Legacy of Surplus Labour 1928–86’, China Quarterly, 116, December 1988, Table 7.
Ibid, pp. 749–53.
For instance, Thomas Schar**, ‘Urbanisation in China since 1949’, China Quarterly, 109, March 1987.
William A. Byrd and Lin Qingsong, China’s Rural Industry. Structure, Development and Reform, 1990, Washington DC: the World Bank and Oxford University Press, p. 275.
PRC, SSB, Statistical Yearbook of China, 1990, 1990, Bei**g (in Chinese). p. 113.
Excluding 1979; Wr and Yr are deflated by the national retail price index (in the absence of a rural index) and Wu by the urban retail price index. Yr is derived from the State Statistical Bureau’s annual household income and expenditure surveys and is thus based on the official definition of income.
Li Guodu, ‘Wage Income of Rural Enterprise Employees’, Development Research, 1, 1986–7, Bei**g: Development Research Institute (in Chinese), p. 280.
The source of pi is Table 6.4 and of yi, PRC, SSB, Statistical Yearbook of China, 1990, 1990, Bei**g (in Chinese), p. 314.
Alan Gelb, ‘TVP Workers’ Incomes, Incentives and Attitudes’, Meng **n, ‘The Rural Labour Market’ and Wu Quhui, Wang Hansheng and Xu **nxin, ‘Non-economic Determinants of Workers’ Incomes’, all in Byrd and Lin, op. cit..
Gelb, op. cit. and Meng, op. cit..
Wu et al., op. cit., Tables 15–4, 15–6, 15–7.
In rural industry, however, post-secondary education does not help at all.
The sources are PRC, SSB, Statistical Yearbook of China, 1986, 1986, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 193–6, 199, 229–30, and PRC, State Council, China National Industrial Census Leading Group, Industrial Census 1985, Volume 7, 1988, Bei**g (in Chinese), pp. 123–4, 174–6, 182–4.
See Khan, Griffin, Riskin and Zhao in Chapter 1.
Yan Shan-**, ‘The Movement of Labor in Chinese Rural Areas: with a Focus on Developed Regions’, The Develo** Economies, 28, 4, December 1990.
Ibid, p. 531.
Ibid, p. 532.
Ibid, p. 533.
Ibid, p. 537.
Jean C. Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China. The Political Economy of Village Government, 1989, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 195.
PRC, SSB, Chinese Rural Economic Statistics. Summary by Counties, 1980–87, 1989, Resolution: global Bei**g (in Chinese).
Excluding the three sparsely settled but relatively high-yield north east provinces. The data on grain yield (kg per mu) in 1988 are from PRC, SSB, Statistical Yearbook of China, 1989, 1989, Resolution: global Bei**g (in Chinese), p. 206.
Hugh Emrys Evans and Peter Ngau, ‘Rural-urban Relations, Household Income Diversification and Agricultural Productivity’, Development and Change, 22, 3, July 1991.
See Chapter 1, Table 1.1.
The probability is estimated as p = e−α/(1 + e−α) where a is the sum of the chosen mean values of the explanatory variables multiplied by their coefficients.
PRC, SSB, Chinese Rural Economic Statistics. Summary by Counties, 1980–87, 1989. Resolution: global Bei**g (in Chinese).
John Knight and Song Lina, ‘The Spatial Contribution to Income Inequality in Rural China’, Applied Economics Discussion Paper No. 106, Institute of Economics and Statistics, University of Oxford, November 1990, forthcoming in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1993.
Net non-agricultural output had to be calculated from the gross figure using another source.
Some counties were omitted from the analysis because they contained fewer than five sampled households and others because they could not be identified for the pooling of data.
Oi, op. cit., p. 195.
Ibid, p. 197.
Gelb, op. cit., p. 288.
Du Rensheng, ‘Rural Employment in China: the Choices’, International Labour Review, 127, 3, 1988, p. 377.
Song Lina, Yang **aodong and Ling Bing, ‘Analysis of a Social Survey of TVP Enterprises’, Development Research, 1, 1986–7, Bei**g: Development Research Institute (in Chinese).
Rizwanul Islam, ‘Growth of Rural Industries in Post-reform China’, Development and Change, 22, 4, October 1991, pp. 697, 716.
Byrd and Lin. on. cit., p. 60.
Ibid, p. 14.
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© 1993 Keith Griffin and Zhao Renwei
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Knight, J., Lina, S. (1993). Workers in China’s Rural Industries. In: Griffin, K., Renwei, Z. (eds) The Distribution of Income in China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23026-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23026-6_7
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