Beijing will release its own version of a closely watched international inequality index, state media reported on Sunday, becoming the first Chinese city to announce such a plan.
The official Xinhua news agency, citing a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics Beijing survey branch, said the city would release a Gini coefficient for last year.
The figure will be published “in a timely manner”, spokesman Xing Zhihong told a press conference on Sunday.
China’s growing wealth gap is a major concern for the communist authorities, who are keen to avoid public discontent that could lead to social unrest in the country of 1.3 billion.
China on Friday released a decade’s-worth of Gini coefficients for the country as a whole after keeping the data under wraps since 2000.
The Gini coefficient is a commonly used measure of income inequality, with a figure of 0 representing perfect equality and 1 total inequality. Some academics view 0.40 as a warning line.