The issue of rural communication development has been conventionally examined under labels such as universal service, digital, divide, broadband deployment, and E-Government, which generally fall into two seemingly distinct categories - access and applications. In China, these concepts are...

Urban development thrives from technology inflows, which refers to the transfer of high-value technology from various cities to local recipients. The asymmetry of technical information-rooted in the tacit knowledge inherent in technology-mandates that technology transfer is heavily dependent on...

How did the telegraph improve market integration in late imperial China? We exploit differences in the exogenous timing of telegraph construction in different prefectures from 1870 to 1911. The empirical results show that the arrival of the telegraph within a prefecture pair reduced the ratio of...

How much did the telegraph improve market integration in imperial China? We exploit differences in the timing of telegraph construction in different prefectures in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries to show that telegraph presence in both prefectures decreased the monthly grain price...

Health policy makers in developing, low income countries are often faced with difficult choices and tradeoffs in allocating the rather limited resources at their disposal. This paper analyzes the varied approaches taken by the Governments of China and India which resulted in differential levels...

We analyze the impacts of power supply, tap water, and other public services on the demand for color TVs, washing machines, and refrigerators in rural China using data from a survey of 20,000 rural households in 1999 designed for this research. We find that the provision of public goods and the...

China has a vast number of unsold and unoccupied homes. Can incentives faced by local politicians explain this puzzle? In China, local governments are monopolists in selling land use-rights, which is a key input for the housing market. City managers, the leader of local governments, are promoted...

Job-related welfare entitlements are common in China. Migrants who do not hold urban registration are, in principle, not entitled to job-related welfare even if they are employees in the State sector. The official explanation is that rural-urban migrants are allocated access to farm land in...

Job-related welfare entitlements are common in China. Migrants who do not hold urban registration are, in principle, not entitled to job-related welfare even if they are employees in the State sector. The official explanation is that rural-urban migrants are allocated access to farm land in...

In this study we argue for a 'Big Push' in infrastructure investments in greater Europe. We propose the building of a European Silk Road, which connects the industrial centres in the west with the populous, but less developed regions in the east of the continent and thereby is meant to generate...