Similar to many other countries, all nations in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) have planned or are planning to develop strong national biofuel programs. The overall goal of this paper is to better understand the impacts of global and regional biofuels on agriculture and the rest of the...

The emergence of China as an economic power is one of the miracle growth stories of the last part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century. Its economy has been the fastest growing compared with the economies of the world since 1980 (World Bank 2002). Growth has occurred in all...

Many educational systems have struggled with the question about how best to give out financial aid. In particular, if students do not know the amount of financial aid that they can receive before they make a decision about where to go to college and what major to study, it may distort their...

This paper examines the effect of the financial crisis on off-farm employment of China's rural labor force. Using a national representative data set collected from across China, the paper finds that there was a substantial impact. By April 2009 the reduction in off-farm employment as a result of...

"With rapid income growth, dairy production and consumption in China have increased significantly. The emergence of the dairy sector provides opportunities for farmers to participate in a high-value, potentially more lucrative enterprise. The overall goal of this paper is to analyze the major...

A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influence the allocation of public resources. In this paper we utilise a unique set of survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly...

The reforms in the research sector vividly illustrate the propensity of the Chinese leadership to implement reform in all sectors of the economy. The government has attempted to increase research productivity by shifting funding from institutional support to competitive grants, supporting mainly...

Although the ways in which farmers access irrigation services in areas that rely on groundwater have changed over the past decade, little empirical work has measured the impact of these changes. This is surprising given the potential effects--both positive and negative. In this paper we explore...