China's per capita floor area exceeds 40 square meters

BEIJING — China's per capita floor area rose to 40.8 square meters in 2016, a sign of improved living conditions, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

The urban per capita floor area stood at 36.6 square meters, up 11.1 percent from 2012, while rural per capita floor area jumped 23.3 percent from the 2012 level to reach 45.8 square meters in 2016, the NBS said.

The quality of residential housing also improved. In 2016, rural residents living in houses built with reinforced concrete or a combination of brick and concrete material accounted for 64.4 percent of the total, 8.8 percentage points higher than the 2013 level.

China has made a lot of progress in terms of people's life quality since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in 2012, NBS data showed.

China's per capita disposable income stood at 23,821 yuan ($3,506) in 2016, up 33.3 percent from 2012 after accounting for inflation.

The Gini coefficient, a measure of income disparity where zero means perfect equality, fell from 0.474 in 2012 to 0.465 in 2016, indicating a smaller income gap.