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  ,

摘要： 当衡量一国或地区居民生活水平时，统计学上一般有收入和消费两种视角。本文利用城乡住户调查中的人均可支配收入和国民经济核算中的居民消费水平，以全球夜间灯光数据为参照，综合收入端与消费端信息，对1997—2016年中国31个地区的真实生活水平进行比较分析。研究证实，灯光亮度与消费水平和人均可支配收入之间均存在显著的线性关系，可以用来估算真实生活水平。根据不同模型的回归结果得到，真实生活水平的最优无偏估计中消费水平的权重范围为（2795%，3831%），人均可支配收入水平的权重范围为（6169%，7205%）。相对于消费水平，人均可支配收入更能准确地反映真实生活水平。本文进一步分析发现，样本期内居民生活水平增速小于人均GDP增速，可见经济的发展并未完全转化为生活水平的提高。中西部地区与东部地区的生活水平仍然存在巨大差距，东部地区的平均生活水平分别是中部和西部地区的17倍和21倍。

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