Regional Inequality in China

When I was in China, all anyone could talk about was how much poorer other parts of China were than the parts I was seeing. The Economist's new set of interactive charts on China's provinces illustrates the point. Here's each province's PPP-adjusted GDP per capita:

I was in Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang, and Liaoning the poorest of which is still about twice as rich as a province like Sichuan. One of the oddities of China is that it's biggest cities are actually a bit on the small side. Shanghai is only the tenth largest metropolitan area in the world (Hong Kong is 12th and Beijing is 19th) even though China is the largest population country in the world and these metropolitan areas are the richest parts of the country. There's no good economic logic to Shanghai being smaller than New York and Beijing being smaller than Los Angeles, but internal migration has traditionally been tightly controlled in China. That's changing, and increased migration to the highest-productivity areas of the country should be a continued source of growth for a while now.