The temporal change of housing inequality in urban China

摘要

This paper reveals temporal changes of housing inequality in hous-ing space and access in urban China and explores the effects overtime of underlying socioeconomic factors (education, occupation,industrial type, and migration status). Household-level micro datafrom 2000 and 2010 of the national population censuses werepooled. Our results showed that inequality in per capita spaceincreased during the new century’sfirstdecade,bothwithinandbetween social classes. Regression analysis and Oaxaca-Blinderdecomposition showed that although the changes in these socioe-conomic factors partially explain the enlarged inequality in percapita space, the changes in these factors’ returns were the maincauses. For housing access, there were no signs of prioritization inthe allocations of state-subsidized housing for those in the low-ranked social strata. Further, the roles of education, occupation,and monopoly industry in accessibility to subsidized housing grad-ually weakened, and the allocation of subsidized housing begancovering other households besides local urban residents.