A national household survey for 2002, containing a specially designed module on subjective well-being, is used to estimate pioneering happiness functions in rural China. The variables predicted by economic theory to be important for happiness are relatively unimportant. The analysis suggests...

We have posed an interesting and possibly original question: Why are Chinese villages that are so close together geographically so far apart economically? We have developed an answer in terms of factor immobiblities and processes of cumulative causation. Our results are not conclusive: Sharper...

Two interesting results are obtained from CASS national household surveys of 1988 and 1995. First, there was a tendency for intra-provincial inequality in both earnings per worker and household income per capita not only to rise in each province but also to converge across provinces. Second,...

The paper analyses two cross-section national household surveys, relating to the years 1988 and 1995, to explain the rise in inequality of income that occured in Chine over those seven years. The Gini coefficient of household income per capita increased from 38 to 45 per cent, i.e. by 1,0...

Increasing wage inequality is a feature of many economies in recent years, and the same is true of China. Whereas in most countries it is normally interpreted as a move from one market equilibrium to another, in China it is more likely to reflect a move away from extreme disequilibirum. Two...