Citizenship often has a rural and local origin. Although villagers' committee elections in China have heightened cadre responsiveness and drawn rural residents into the local polity, sizable obstacles to inclusion remain because electoral rules do not enfranchise villagers reliably. That...

Move over Michigan. The Fifth District's automotive industry is revving its engine. With three assembly plants and numerous suppliers, can it merge into the fast lane?

A young upstart in the airline business is expanding the South's flight options and might bring economic development to Columbia, S.C., as well.

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...

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

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...