China Has Become Much More Unequal, and Property Market Is to Blame

Expensive urban homes have fueled growing wealth inequality in China, allowing the country’s richest people to consolidate their assets in properties that do little to encourage sustainable economic growth, experts say.

China’s Gini coefficient — which measures the distribution of wealth in a society and is the most commonly used tool to gauge inequality — rose by more than a third in just 10 years, between 2002 and 2012, due in large part to rapidly rising real estate prices, Wan Haiyuan, an associate professor at Beijing Normal University Business School, said at a news conference Thursday. The conference was hosted by Peking University to announce the results of a research project on wealth inequality in China led by multiple universities.