A nationally representative rural labour force survey of China is analysed to explore the allocation of labour among farming, local non-farming and temporary migration activities. Various tests of labour market segmentation are conducted. The estimated returns to labour off the farm greatly...

Various measures of satisfaction with life or happiness in China appear not to have risen in recent years, despite China's remarkable growth of income per capita. The paper brings together and integrates the results of four papers by the authors to provide a methodologically and substantively...

Together with a companion paper to be published in the March 2010 issue, this is an ambitious attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap. The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household...

Why are villages that are geographically so close together economically so far apart? This question is examined using a survey of 1000 households in seven villages in Hebei province, China. An answer is developed in terms of factor immobility and processes of cumulative causation. Although a...

China's great size and diversity give rise to serious principal-agent problems among tiers of government. The fiscal relationships between central and provincial governments over the period of economic reform are examined within an agency framework. Provincial governments have been responsible...

This is an ambitious attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap. The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind. The paper shows...