关键词: 生活水平, 地区比较, 居民消费水平, 人均可支配收入, 夜间灯光

Abstract:  In statistics, there are two perspectives to measure the living standards in a country or a region: income perspective and consumption perspective. This paper synthesizes the information from the income end and the consumption end to analyze the real living standards in the 31 regions across China between 1997 and 2016 using household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) per capita in the national accounting system and disposable income per capita in the household survey with the global nighttime lights data as a reference. The results show that there exists significant linear relationship between lights intensity and HFCE per capita or disposable income per capita, which gives the evidence that nighttime lights can be used to estimate the real living standards. According to the regression results of different models, the optimal weight for HFCE per capita in the best linear unbiased estimator of the real living standards is between 2795% and 3831%, while this figure for disposable income per capita is between 6169% and 7205%. Compared with HFCE per capita, disposable income per capita can measure the real living standards more accurately. Further analysis reveals that the growth rate of the real living standards is below GDP per capita, which suggests that complete transformation from the economic development to the increasing of living standards did not happen. Moreover, a huge gap still exists between eastern regions and central and western regions in the living standards, and the former is on average 17 and 21 times as the latter two regions, respectively.

Key words: living standards, regional comparison, HFCE per capita, disposable income per capita, nighttime lights  ,