Gray areas of income revealed
Most people in China are familiar with the term "gray income" but have seldom tried to find what it really means. Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute, affiliated to China Reform Foundation, is one of the welcome exceptions. In fact, he has been studying the impact of gray income on China's economy, as well as society for some time now.
The media describes Wang as "the first scholar to conduct systematic research on gray income". He started the study when he was in charge of an investigation into the distribution of national income and gray income that was released in 2007. Not surprisingly, his report shows a huge gap between China's highest-income and lowest-income groups (55 times), which was significantly wider than the National Bureau of Statistics' (NBS) figure (21 times).
The serious difference between the two studies, according to Wang's analysis, can be attributed to the NBS' failure to take into account the huge amount of gray income in the country.