Abstract: Promotion of children's health has always been a common concern of the government, the society and the academia. This paper uses data of 2020 from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to explore the influence of income inequality on children's health in the rural areas. The findings indicate that income inequality has a substantial detrimental effect on the health of rural children when measured by the county-level Gini coefficient, and this impact decreases with the increase of household income ranking. Relative income, as measured by the Kakwani Index, also has a significant negative impact on rural children's health. Robustness test shows that the estimation results in this paper are reliable. The findings from the heterogeneity analysis indicate that income inequality has significant negative impact on the health of males and children of school age. Therefore, measures including increasing the income of low-income families, allocating medical resources rationally, improving the social psychological counseling mechanism, and paying attention to strengthen health awareness are suggested as solutions.

Key words: income inequality hypothesis, relative income hypothesis, children's health, rural family