Implications of different income diversification indexes: the case of rural China

This study investigates rural income diversification measures. Applying rural household survey data in China, we utilize OLS and quantile regression to compare the effects from various ruraldiversification measures on household income. Our results indicate the high importance of using a two-dimensional rather than a one-dimensional measure of diversification in empirical analyses, at least in the rural China case. Among the two-dimensional indexes, the strong consistency of the quantile patterns between income and diversification, and the plausibility of changes in these relationships, suggest that any one of the diversification measures isacceptable in the relevant studies.