In the past several years, labor shortage in China has become an emerging issue. However, there is heated debate on whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and entered a new era of labor shortage from a period of unlimited labor supply. Most empirical studies on this topic focus on the...

We use two rounds of surveys, taken in 2000 and 2008 in the Zhili Township children's garment cluster in Zhejiang Province, to examine in depth the evolution of this industrial cluster. Firm size has grown on average in terms of output and employment, and increasing divergence in firm sizes has...

Using a census survey of households in Guizhou Province, this paper examines the patterns of village poverty and inequality and their major correlates. The results show that poverty incidences vary greatly among villages and inequality is relatively high within villages in these impoverished...

Wenzhou used to be one of the poorest regions in eastern China. With limited arable land, poor road access to major cities, and little support from the upper level governments, this region seemed to lack all the conditions necessary for economic growth. However, over the past several decades...

Knowledge of poverty prevalence is essential for any society concerned with improving public welfare and reducing poverty. In this paper, we estimate and compare poverty incidence rates in China using four nationally representative surveys: the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) of 2010, the...

This paper presents a few stylized facts on the patterns of China's industrialization by computing a set of multi-dimensional measures on industrial concentration, regional specialization, and clustering based on census data at the firm level in 1995 and 2004. Our results show that China's rapid...