Is "urban-rural gap" a proper English term for a disparity between urban and rural areas or just a word-for-word translation from Chinese?

I came across this phrase when I was reading a research paper. Here's a quote from the abstract:

I find that the urban-rural gap accounts for 40% of mean country inequality and much of its cross-country variation.

After doing some research on the internet, I've found out that "urban-rural gap" is frequently used on Chinese and Taiwanese news sites. Personally, I've never seen this wording before so I'm not sure if this is a direct translation from Chinese. Is this a proper English term for a disparity between urban and rural areas or just an artifact of a word-for-word translation?

Google ngrams (which searches many published books) gives some usage for the phrase "urban-rural", which peaks towards about 1990. There are no hits for "urban-rural gap".

The usage of "urban-rural" varies. You can have "urban-rural areas" or "urban-rural" interactions. These are in in British English and American English results. I think that the reason that your search is skewed towards Chinese and Taiwanese news sites is likely to do with current study on the urban-rural gap in those countries. It may be a direct translation in those instances, but it is an understandable combination of English words, and has been used in previous works, too.

As a native speaker of UK English, former language teacher and currently a full-time translator, the phrase seems perfectly natural to me. It's just another way of describing the difference between town and country.