In this paper we describe the major trends in China's income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market development, labour absorption, and the Kuznets...

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the degree of importance of governance, which has in recent years been emphasized in the field of development economics as a factor contributing to economic development, in Japan's postwar reconstruction during the period 1945 to 1955. In addition, in...

When India became a republic in 1950, the economy was primarily agrarian, with threefifths of output originating from agriculture. In the sixty years since independence, there has been a significant transformation of economic activity away from agriculture, with less than one-fifth of output now...

In a country where two out of five citizens, about 450 million people, live in poverty, it is no exaggeration to say that the development experience of Kerala – a coastal state on the southwestern tip of India – stands out as extraordinary. Despite a history of anemic economic growth, this...

Using China's provincial-level panel data from 1978–2008, we examine the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth in the context of China's transformation from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy. We divide entrepreneurship into two types: business creation and innovation....

This paper studies the persistent effects of China’s Great Wall, built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), on contemporary regional ethnic diversity and economic development. Using rich township-level and individual-level data combined with spatial regression discontinuity strategy, we find that...

To investigate the causes of Korea’s growth slowdown over the past thirty years, we estimate the contributions of major developmental factors, including i) demographic factors (changes in population growth and workforce age due to the demographic transition), ii) quality-of-life-related choice...