Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...

This paper reviews the history of the practice of quarantines, rediscovering the 19th century 'Sanitarian' movement in Britain that sprang from a recognition that quarantines had failed to stop the spread of diseases and were not cost-effective. To our knowledge, the key figure among the...