Abstract:

Rural regional income inequality was currently a hot issue studying on rural district. This paper focuses on the changes of rural regional income inequality and measures the income changes of rural residents and decomposes the income structure to concentration effect and structure effect in Hunan from 1993 to 2008 on basis of Gini index, and then explains the causes of its real inequality. In order to explore the factors behind the changes in rural income inequality in Hunan，the overall rural income inequality was decomposed into contributions by different income sources：wages，household operations，properties and transfers．This analysis implies that the wage income will play the most key role on rural regional income inequality in Hunan. The increasing contribution from wages was mainly due to the increase of its share from 1997 to 2002, and was mainly due to evident elevation of its concentration after 2002．In recent years，with the decline of household operations concentration index and its share in total income, it had weak effects in decreasing the total regional inequality, and then it was a main factor in rural total income．The rural regional inequality should be reduced by more financial transfer and public services from the local and central government in Hunan．