In the PRC and India, the pace of growth was faster for urban mean income than
for rural mean income, leading to a significant widening in the urban–rural income
gap between the early 1990s and late 2000s: the ratio of urban mean income to
rural mean income, k, increased from 1.74 to 2.37 in the PRC and from 1.74 to
2.02 in India. In Indonesia and the Philippines, however, k remained more or less
unchanged in the past two decades, at about 1.78 in Indonesia and 2.07 in the
Philippines.
In the PRC, India, and Indonesia, both urban and rural inequalities increased in
the past two decades, and the increases were particularly pronounced in the PRC.
For these countries, urban inequality grew faster than rural inequality, especially
for the PRC. Since the PRC’s urban inequality was lower than rural inequality in