Replaced with revised version of paper 08/25/03.

Chen Y. P., Liu M. and Zhang Q. Development of financial intermediation and the dynamics of urban-rural disparity in China, 1978-1998, Regional Studies. This paper focuses on the impacts of financial intermediation development on the urban-rural income disparity (URID) in China. Using a...

China's fiscal arrangement in the 1980s has preserved local governments' incentive but the 1994 fiscal reform recentralized revenues. Since then, farmers' tax burdens have risen steeply and become a major challenge to the state legitimacy. How to account for the huge regional variation? Why were...

The present paper examines the historical evolution of China's rural taxation system from the pre-reform period to the late 1990s. We propose that because of information asymmetry between the upper-level and the lower-level governments, local governments had to be granted some informal tax...