Housing Privatization, Marketization and Wealth Inequality in Urban China
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| Title | Housing Privatization, Marketization and Wealth Inequality in Urban China
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| Author | He Xiaobin and Xia Fan |
| Organization | School of Management, HUST; Guanghua School of Management, PKU |
| Email | fxia@gsm.pku.edu.cn |
| Key Words | Housing Privatization; Wealth Inequality; Property Transformation |
| Abstract | This paper proposes a property transformation perspective to study the mechanisms of wealth accumulation and wealth disparity creation during China’s post socialist transformation. It examines how housing privatization, marketization have translated a greater wealth inequality between cadres and ordinary workers, between state work units and private work units. In the 1980s, cadres and those working in the public sectors were more likely to be assigned a bigger and better house for almost free, whereas ordinary workers and those in the private sectors had to rely on a self-built or inherited house, or even buy a house from the market. The housing policies since the 1980s have essentially encouraged working units to privatize their houses by selling them to existing residents. Data analyses of Chinese Household Income Project 1988,1995 and 2002 show that with the large scale housing privatization since the mid-1990s, cadres and those working in the state work units are more likely to obtain a private house from their working units at a discounted price than ordinary workers and those in the private work units. With the recent boom of housing market in China, housing inequality prior to and during the housing privatization has been translated greater disparity in housing value between cadres and ordinary workers. In addition, cadres’ advantage of housing value seems accelerating with the rapid development of housing market. |
| Serial Number | WP118 |
| Time | 2011-10-27 |
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