[China] Rural poverty China’s biggest economic headache: study

from Financial Express

BEIJING, China’s biggest economic headache is finding work for its surplus rural labourers and narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, a leading government think-tank said in a report published on Thursday.

Agriculture was diminishing as an engine of economic growth and yet millions of surplus, rural labourers were failing to find jobs in the cities, the Xinhua news agency cited a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) as saying.

Slower growth of rural incomes, compared to the rest of the country’s population, could make it harder for China to achieve sustainable, balanced growth in the long-term, the report said.

Other challenges facing the economy included blind expansion by companies which continued to fuel the kind of overcapacity the central government has been trying hard to curb.

—Reuters