Over the past 30 to 40 years, some East Asian countries have managed to achieve rapid poverty reduction despite rising inequality. In China, for example, very rapid output growth (at an annual rate of around 9 per cent - 10 per cent between 1981 and 2005) was associated with dramatic declines in poverty (at an estimated annual rate of 6.6 per cent over the same period), even though inequality measured by the Gini index rose from 0.16 in 1980 to about 0.48 in 2011. However, inequality in both assets and incomes in China was extremely low at the start of the high growth phase, and this was probably critical to enabling rapid income growth.