Brazil, China and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were ample...

Empirical studies of tax and benefit incidence routinely ignore behavioral responses and measurement errors. This paper offers an econometric method of estimating the mean benefit withdrawal rate (marginal tax rate) allowing for incentive effects, measurement errors, and correlated latent...

At the outset of China's reform period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed and unpopular policies. While...

The central governments of many developing countries have chosen to decentralize their anti-poverty programs, in the expectation that local agents are better informed about local needs. The paper shows that this potential advantage of decentralized eligibility criteria can come at a large cost,...

Chen and Ravallion use China's national household surveys for rural and urban areas to measure and explain the welfare impacts of the changes in goods and factor prices attributed to WTO accession. Price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to capture both direct...

December 1997 - In rural China, those in the poorest wealth decile are the least well-insured, with 40 percent of an income shock being passed on to current consumption. By contrast, consumption by the richest third of households is protected from almost 90 percent of an income shock. Jalan and...

While increasing income inequality in China has been commented on and studied extensively, relatively little analysis is available on inequality in other dimensions of human development. Using data from different sources, this paper presents some basic facts on the evolution of spatial...

By exploring the role of SEZs in China’s integration with the world economy, we also investigate the underlining challenges faced by the economy. The analysis brings forth the indisputable fact that SEZs enabled the Chinese economy to trigger its growth standards and achieve its ambition of...

This paper constructs and analyses a long run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late...