The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of\r\nChina’s rural labor markets. To meet this goal, we have three specific objectives. First,\r\nwe will provide an update of the trends in off-farm labor participation and wages of the\r\nsample households and examine...

This paper examines the emergence of labour markets in China through the lens of returns to rural education. It demonstrates that methodology plays an important role in explaining the low estimates of returns in previous studies. When wages are defined on an hourly basis and sample selectivity...

Previous studies have found that the returns to education in rural China are far lower than\r\nestimates for market economies. In this paper, we try to determine why previous estimates are\r\nso low. Whereas estimates for the early 1990s average 2.3 percent, we find an average return\r\nof 6.4...

China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China’s key challenge is whether it can become competitive in quasi-skilled and skilled industrial sectors so...

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in...

Despite the rise in grade retention in poor areas in rural China recently, little work has been done to understand the impact of grade retention on the educational performance of students in these areas in rural China. This paper seeks to redress this shortcoming and examines the effect of grade...

Migration is one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, there are concerns about the potential negative effects of migration on the educational achievement of the children that are left behind in villages when one or both of their parents...

The overall goal of the paper is to understand the progress of the design and implementation of China’s New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) program between 2004 (the second year of the program) and 2007. In the paper we seek to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of the program using...