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Hidden Income in China

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The Size and Distribution of Hidden Household Income in China

Xiaolu Wang National Economic Research Institute China Reform Foundation C510 Guo Hong Building, No. A-11 Muxidi Beili Xicheng District, Beijing, 100038, China wangxiaolu@neri.org.cn

Wing Thye Woo Economics Department University of California Davis, California 95616, USA wtwoo@ucdavis.edu and School of Finance Central University of Finance and Economics Beijing, China

December 25, 2010 revision



This article is part of a research project of the Chinese Research Society for Economic System Reform. We thank the many individuals and organizations who made this project possible. We also thank the readers of the earlier Wang (2007) study and of earlier drafts of this report for their valuable comments. We are solely responsible for the remaining mistakes in this article.

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The Size and Distribution of Hidden Household Income in China Xiaolu Wang and Wing Thye Woo

Abstract Official Chinese data on urban household income are seriously flawed because of significant underreporting of income by respondents and non-participation by the high income groups in official household surveys. We collected urban household income and expenditure data in a way that increased their reliability and the coverage of the rich. We utilized the well-known relationship between Engel’s coefficient and income level through two different approaches to deduce the true level of household income for each of the seven Chinese income categories (lowest income, low income, lower middle income, middle income, upper middle income, high income, and highest income). We found that the ratio of our estimated income to official income increased from 1.12 for the lowest income group to 3.19 for the highest income group. Total household disposable income in 2008 is RMB 14.0 trillion according to the official data but RMB 23.2

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