DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03012.v1
title: Chinese Household Income Project, 1995
title: Version 1

description: The purpose of this project was to measure and estimate the distribution of personal income in both rural and urban areas of the People's Republic of China. The principal investigators based their definition of income on cash payments and on a broad range of additional components: payments in kind valued at market prices, agricultural output produced for self-consumption valued at market prices, the value of food and other direct subsidies, and the imputed value of housing services. The rural component of this collection consists of two data files, one in which the individual is the unit of analysis (Part 1) and a second in which the household is the unit of analysis (Part 2). Individual rural respondents reported on their employment status, level of education, Communist Party membership, type of employer (e.g., public, private, or foreign), type of economic sector in which they were employed, occupation, whether they held a second job, retirement status, monthly pension, monthly wage, and other sources of income. Demographic variables include relationship to householder, gender, age, and student status. Rural households reported extensively on the character of the household and residence. Information was elicited on type of terrain surrounding the house, geographic position, type of house, and availability of electricity. Also reported were sources of household income (e.g., farming, industry, government, rents, and interest), taxes paid, value of farm, total amount and type of cultivated land, financial assets and debts, quantity and value of various crops, amount of grain purchased or provided by a collective, use of chemical fertilizers, gasoline, and oil, quantity and value of agricultural machinery, and all household expenditures (e.g., food, fuel, medicine, education, transportation, and electricity). The urban component of this collection also consists of two data files, one in which the individual is the unit of analysis (Part 3) and a second in which the household is the unit of analysis (Part 4). Individual urban respondents reported on their economic status within the household, Communist Party membership, sex, age, nature of employment, and relationship to the household head. Information was collected on all types and sources of income from each member of the household whether working, nonworking, or retired, all revenue received by owners of private or individual enterprises, and all in-kind payments (e.g., food, durable goods, and nondurable goods). Urban households reported total income (including salaries, interest on savings and bonds, dividends, rent, leases, alimony, gifts, and boarding fees), all types and values of food subsidies received, and total debt. Information was also gathered on household accommodations and living conditions, including number of rooms, total living area in square meters, availability and cost of running water, sanitary facilities, heating and air-conditioning equipment, kitchen availability, location of residence, ownership of home, and availability of electricity and telephone. Households reported on all their expenditures including amounts spent on food items such as wheat, rice, edible oils, pork, beef and mutton, poultry, fish and seafood, sugar, and vegetables by means of coupons in state-owned stores and at free market prices. Information was also collected on rents paid by the households, fuel available, type of transportation used, and availability and use of medical and child care. The Chinese Household Income Project collected data in 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. ICPSR holds data from the first three collections, and information about these can be found on the series description page. Data collected in 2007 are available through the China Institute for Income Distribution.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed consistency checks.; Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Rural Individual Data 
 DS2: Rural Household Data 
 DS3: Urban Individual Data 
 DS4: Urban Household Data
description: Chinese Household Income Project Series
description: face-to-face interview 
The data are provided as SAS transport files that were created using the SAS XPORT engine.
Users may disaggregate the data down to the county level through use of the Codes for the Administrative Divisions of the People's Republic of China (in Chinese) issued by the State Statistical Bureau.
The Chinese Household Income Project is a joint research effort sponsored by the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Asian Development Bank, and the Ford Foundation. Additional support was provided by the East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
This collection has not been processed by ICPSR staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this collection in essentially the same form in which they were received. When appropriate, documentation has been converted to Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been converted to non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity.
description: Resident population of the People's Republic of China.
description: The data collection consists of two distinct samples of the urban and rural populations of the People's Republic of China, which were selected from significantly larger samples (approximately 65,000 rural households and 35,000 urban households) drawn by the State Statistical Bureau.