A man begs in front of a Shanghai railway station in February, 2015.

As stock markets collapse and economic expansion declines, the Chinese people can at least count on resilience in one social trend: income inequality.

Inequalities in the world’s second largest economy have been widening, especially in access to education and healthcare, say the authors of the “Chinese People’s Development Report 2015,” published by a research institute of the nation’s top-rated Peking University.

The report didn’t issue a new Gini coefficient for household income for 2015, an index used to measure the distribution of wealth in an economy. Instead, its authors put forth an already broadly-held assessment that the gap is widening.

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“In the last 30 years, income inequality in our country has become a rising trend, increasing from 0.3 in the 1980s to 0.45 or more in recent years,” the report said. A Gini coefficient of zero represents perfect equality, while one means perfect inequality.

China’s National Statistics Bureau said last year that the coefficient fell slightly to 0.469 in 2014 from 0.473 in 2013. It said the index hit a high of 0.491 in 2008 and has been ebbing since.

The government hasn’t published its index for 2015 yet, but its assertion of a decline might be at odds with the Peking University report of a widening gap. The university’s report said that the income coefficient for households in 2012 was 0.49, which would suggest there wasn’t much of a decline between 2008 and 2012.

An economics professor at Texas A&M University in 2012 estimated the Middle Kingdom’s Gini coefficient at a whopping 0.61.

The Gini reading in the past has been a matter of some controversy in China. Beijing stopped releasing publications of the measure for a decade before resuming in 2012; in neither case did the government explain its rationale.

The Gini measurement, named for the sociologist who invented it, also became a political weapon for the Communist Party’s fallen star Bo Xilai, who laid claim to considerable populist appeal in part because he would publicly point to China’s rising wealth gap—citing an unverified coefficient of 0.46 in 2012—as a risk for social unrest.

Sticking with the more circumspect estimate of “0.45 or more” seems safe for Peking University’s Institute of Social Science Survey. The chief author of the latest report, Li Jianxin, and the statistics bureau didn’t immediately respond to requests from China Real Time for comment.

The Peking University report noted that the threshold that potentially triggers social unrest is 0.4, a long-reiterated loose consensus among analysts and social-service organizations.

The Gini index in the U.S. stood at 0.48 in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The measurement is usually notably high in Latin American countries, for examplereaching 0.517 in Panama, earning the region the moniker of the most unequal in the world—though governments there have made strides to close the gap in recent years.

The irony wasn’t lost on China’s resident wags. “China is becoming Latin America,” a blogger wrote Thursday on China’s Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform. “I’m telling you, if this is what it’s going to be like, even Latin America will be a Chinese dream!”

The study this week reiterated a longstanding statistic on inequality, saying that the top 1% of Chinese households owns a third of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 25% have only around 1%. It put out the same numbers last year. The institute said this year’s report was based on interviews with 14,960 families.

The disparities were sharper when focusing on household assets, rather than income. China’s Gini coefficient for this measurement rose from 0.45 in 1995 to 0.73 in 2012, the report said.

In the widening wealth gaps in education and healthcare, the report pointed to disparities between urban and rural areas, as well as between regions and between genders. Inequality in access to education reached a record-high for those born in the 1980s, it said. “This suggests that future related public policy should focus on” promoting equal access to educational opportunities, the report said.

It said women have lower levels of education and access to healthcare than men, and that the large wealth gap between urban and rural residents is in part driving higher levels of depression, chronic hypertension and respiratory diseases among rural residents.

—Chuin-Wei Yap

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