The Dynamics of Urban Poverty in China

Income information on the same urban Chinese households over six years in the 1990s provides an opportunity to describe movements in and out of poverty and to compare the dynamics of poverty in urban China with poverty dynamics in other countries. Poverty in urban China resembles poverty in other countries insofar as poverty is a transient state for many of the households who experience it in any given year. At the same time, an important fraction of all poverty episodes in urban China are accounted for by a relatively few households who experience long poverty spells.