In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of...

Prices differ across space: from province to province, from rural (or urban) areas in one province to rural (or urban) areas in another province, and from rural to urban areas within one province. Systematic differences in prices across a range of goods and services in different localities imply...

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We use a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and find that the respondents care to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in...

This paper offers an analysis of the optimality of unemployment benefits based on the concept of no-envy. Using a general equilibrium framework whit uncertainty, we derive the conditions for a trade-off between the intensity of envy and the expected percentage of envious persons. If the...

Though much has been written about annual income inequality in China, little research has been conducted on longer run measures of income inequality and on income mobility. This paper compares income mobility of urban individuals in China and the United States in the 1990s. The following...

If we take a look at developments on the labour market, we find that the rate of employment stands in a close relationship to the introduction of new technologies and their social and cultural consequences. The immediate effects of new technologies on new forms of work-structures are, in fact,...

Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to be low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia, unemployment,...

This paper approaches the problem of inequalities in China. It is specifically focused on analyzing the effects of intra-provincial disparities on provincial economic development. Rising inequalities have been widely discussed in the literature on the examples of fast growing developing...

In this paper, we measure the implications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Palestinian employment and earnings. We quantify the conflict by the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market. Data on...

This paper deals with the question whether the concept of transitional labour market(TLM) might be useful to formulate hypotheses about the relationship between the size and nature of labour market transitions and the performance of employment regimes. The paper starts from the idea that the TLM...