An Re-estimation of the Income Gap between Western Urban and Rural Residents:Based on both Economic Income and Social Income Perspective

Using a combination method of questionnaire and calculation,this paper re-estimated the income gap between western urban and rural areas.The result shows that the gap of urban-rural social security income is much larger than the gap of urban-rural economic income.The gap of housing fund and subsidy income is biggest among those gaps.If we consider the social security income,the gap of urban-rural income would be expanded 11.6 percent.However,if we consider all social income,the gap of urbanrural income would be decrease 3.4 percent.The social income gaps are much difference among the provinces in west area.The social security incomes also make an indirect impact on the gap between urban and rural economical incomes by that when the social security incomes gap between urban and rural add 1%;the economical incomes gap would add 0.168% average.As a conclusion,increasing the income of rural residents is an effective path to narrow the income gap between urban and rural in west area.We can start from eight measures as following : Increasing the social security income of rural residents,keeping the proportion of government revenue stable,developing the priority of social security development in rural area,reforming thee income statistics.