Economists studying socialist transition have established a paradigmatic view that emphasizes flexible prices, openness to international trade, minimal government intervention in market operations, and private ownership of productive resources. China's, the largest and best performing transition...

The reform of China's enterprise system increasingly reflects the outcome of China's emerging property rights market. We distinguish between a centrally-directed reform strategy, with characteristics similar to those of a Pigouvian tax, and a market-driven reform process, which captures the...

Chinese attitudes toward the treatment of men and women in the workplace reflect two divergent perspectives. The legacy of China's past includes a strong tendency to favor male over female workers, while over the last four decades China's government has vigorously propagated an ideology of...

After briefly surveying the current circumstances of China' s state-owned industrial enterprises, this paper offers a series of policy recommendations organized around two objectives: raising the returns to capital and promoting the development of market-supporting institutions. The author...

We study bank discrimination against private firms in transition countries. Theoretically, we show that banks may discriminate for non-profit reasons, but this discrimination diminishes with a bank’s incentives and human capital. Employing matching bank-firm data from China, we empirically...

This paper exploits the panel dimension of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS) in order to analyze the main changes occurring in agriculture in Vietnam over the period 1993- 1998. This period was marked by a continuation of the reforms that began in 1988 with the implementation of...

Deborah Davis-Friedmann (1991) described the “retirement” pattern of the Chinese elderly in the prereform era as “ceaseless toil”: lacking sufficient means of support, the elderly had to work their entire lives. In this paper we re-cast the metaphor of ceaseless toil in a labor supply...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market)...

Market reforms are generally credited with the rapid growth enjoyed by China's rural sector. This growth has not been without some cost, however, as inequality has also increased. Estimates suggest that the Gini rose from less than 0.20 to over 0.40 during this period. In this paper we go behind...