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...

A Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop-specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture. Despite a modest behavior assumption about equal marginal returns of non-land inputs among crops, this method does not require price information, which is...

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty. In this study we use a simultaneous equations model and...

"From a theoretical perspective crop yields should tend to converge over time and space as: growth in yield potential exhibits diminishing returns; an increasing share of farmers shift to using high yielding varieties (HYVs); barriers to the free flow of knowledge and information are removed; and...

There have been competing arguments about the effect of public infrastructure on productivity in the literature. Level-based regressions generally show a much higher return to public capital than private capital, while difference-based regressions tend to find insignificant or even negative...

In the past two decades, China has achieved world renown for reducing rural poverty. However, it is becoming harder to reduce poverty and inequality further in China, even though its economy continues to grow. This report compares the impact specific rural public investments can have on...

"Since the early 1990s, Uganda has been one of Africa's fastest growing countries. However, at the sub-national level, growth has been uneven due to civil conflict in the northern region. Using a panel of household and community level data, this paper examines the links between security and...

The key motivation behind this study is to explore the many patterns of interactions between economic and non-economic factors in sub-Saharan Africa (hereafter referred to as Africa) in order to map out a typology of different types of country situations and thus, corresponding future options to...