In the past several years, labor shortages in China have become an issue. However, there is heated debate as to whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and moved from a period of unlimited supply to a new era of labor shortage. Most empirical studies on this topic focus on estimation of...

Focusing on a remote area in rural China, we use a panel census of households in 26 villages to show that socially observable spending has risen sharply in recent years. We demonstrate that such spending by households is highly sensitive to social spending by other villagers. This suggests that...

"We use two rounds of surveys, taken in 2000 and 2008 in the Zhili Township children's garment cluster in Zhejiang Province, to examine in depth the evolution of this industrial cluster. Firm size has grown on average in terms of output and employment, and increasing divergence in firm sizes has...

This paper develops a framework to measure the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty. Increased investments in agricultural R&D can lower food prices by increasing food production, and lower food prices benefit the urban poor because they often spend more than 60% of their income on...

This study develops an analytical framework to account for sources of rapid economic growth in China. The traditional Solow approach includes only two sources, i.e. increased use of inputs and technical change. We expanded the approach to include a third source of economic growth-structural...

In developing countries, identifying the most effective community-level governance structure is a key issue and, increasingly, empirical evaluation of the effects of democratization on the provision of local public goods is needed. Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of villages in rural...

Because land is scarce, farmers in China increasingly have to rely on nonfarm activities to enhance their incomes. The functioning of rural nonfarm labor markets is therefore crucial in determining who has access to nonfarm employment. Previous studies have identified human capital as a key...

This paper develops a method for decomposing the contributions of various types of public investment on regional inequality and applies the method to rural China. Public investments are found to have contributed to production growth in both the agricultural and rural non-agricultural sectors,...

Rapid industrial development and urbanization transfer more and more land away from agricultural production, threatening China's capability to feed itself. This paper analyzes the determinants of land use by modeling arable land and sown area separately. An inverse U-shaped relationship between...