Over the last three decades, China's product, labor, and capital markets have become gradually more integrated within its borders, although integration has been significantly slower for capital markets. There remains a significant urban-rural divide, and Chinese cities tend to be under-sized by...

Although it had a a lower income level than India in 1980, China's 2006 per capita gross domestic product stands more than twice that of India's. This paper investigates the role of the business environment in explaining China's productivity advantage using recent firm-level survey data. The...

Based on a comprehensive worldwide firm survey, this paper looks at how the business environment and economic agglomeration affect job creation, holding constant conventional determinants of firm growth, such as firm ownership, size, and age. The analysis finds that economic agglomeration is...

This paper uses data from a large survey of Chinese firms to investigate whether local government efforts to facilitate market development improve firm efficiency. Both government provision of information about products, markets, and innovation and government assistance in arranging loans are...

Performance contracts are widely used to reform state-owned enterprises. By June 1994, there were 565 such contracts in 32 developing countries, used prinicipally to reform large utilities and other monopolies, and roughly another 103,000 in China, where they are also used to reform state...

Using a large panel dataset of Chinese industrial firms, the authors examine the determinants of access to loans from formal financial intermediaries and extension of trade credit. Poorly performing state-owned enterprises were more likely to redistribute credit to firms with less privileged...

Over the past few years, many studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural, and institutional determinants of corruption. This study complements these cross-country studies by focusing on microeconomic factors that affect bribes paid in a single sector of the economy. Using...

In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

The empirical literature on the effects of ownership has not distinguished between the effects of ownership and the effects of control. It has also generally ignored the dynamic effects of various ownership and control rights. Using a rich set of panel data about changes in China's state-owned...

The World Bank has increasingly focused on firm-level surveys to build the data foundation needed for accurate policy analysis in developing and transition economies. The authors take stock of some recent Bank surveys, and discuss how to improve their results. Lessons on data issues, and...