China's transition to a market economy has been a process of basic institutional changes and institution building. The institutional change from a socialist labour regime (SLR) as one of the backbones upholding the traditional leninist system to a new 'socialist' market labour regime (SMLR)...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

This paper describes the Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC), a unique data source in terms of spatial coverage and panel dimension for research on labor markets in China. The survey is a collaboration project between the Australian National University, Beijing Normal...

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries - a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life...

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students’ stated beliefs and attitudes. We exploit a major textbook reform in China that was rolled out between 2004 and 2010 with the explicit intention of shaping youths’ ideology. To measure its effect, we present evidence from a novel...

This paper describes the Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC), a unique data source in terms of spatial coverage and panel dimension for research on labor markets in China. The survey is a collaboration project between the Australian National University, Beijing Normal...

We investigate whether Chinese household incomes have caught up to those of the middle class in the developed world. Using nationwide survey data for 2002 and 2013, we find considerable catch up. Defining the global middle class as being neither poor nor rich in the developed world, we estimate...

This introductory chapter provides background to and summarizes key findings from the chapters in this book, all of which share in common their use of household data from the latest round of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) survey to analyze recent trends in inequality in China. We...

In this chapter we examine trends in China's household incomes, income distribution and inequality for China as a whole and for each of the urban, rural and rural-urban migrant subgroups, as well as analyzing changes in the income gaps between the urban and rural sectors and among the...

This chapter seeks to throw new light on the emergence of the Chinese economic middle class using data from the China Household Income Project from 2002, 2007, and 2013. We find that between 2002 and 2013 China's income distribution was transformed from a pyramid shape, with a majority having...