Asian governments intervene in the world rice market to protect domestic consumers. Whether consumers are nutritionally vulnerable depends on the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices. Common demand models applied to household survey and market price data ignore quality substitution...

Summary There is growing interest in the rural non-farm sector in developing countries as a contributor to economic growth, employment generation, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction. Access to infrastructure is identified in some studies as a factor that affects non-farm rural...

China’s local populations can be counted in two ways: people with hukou household registration from each place, and people actually residing in each place. For most of the first three decades of the reform era the hukou count denominated per capita GDP figures. Output and living standards were...

We compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to examine the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being. Impacts on subjective well-being are...

Using rural household panel data from three Chinese provinces, this paper identifies determinants of long-term poverty and tests the duration dependence on the probability to leave poverty. Special emphasis is given to the selection of the poverty line and inter-regional differences across...

There is little evidence showing whether health information transmitted via text messages can change health and educational outcomes. We conducted a randomized field experiment involving 900 primary students in rural China to study whether a health education campaign conducted via text message...

Summary The overall goal of the paper is to better understand the development of groundwater markets in northern China. Field survey shows that groundwater markets in northern China have emerged and are developing rapidly. Developing in a number of ways that make them appear somewhat similar to...