We report on the results of a randomised controlled trial conducted among over 2,000 children in 60 elementary schools in rural Shaanxi Province, North-west China. We find that providing children with daily iron supplements for six months improved children's haemoglobin levels and standardised...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a randomized controlled trial designed to measure the impact of a parental training program on the nutritional status of primary school students in rural Shaanxi Province, in northwest China. Design/methodology/approach – Using...

Purpose Although access to safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world, drinking water remains a large problem in China today, especially in rural areas. Despite increased government investment in water resource protection and management,...

Purpose The need for a universal rural pension system has been heightened by demographic changes in rural China, including the rapid aging of the nation’s rural population and a dramatic decline in fertility. In response to these changes, China’s Government introduced the New Rural Social...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe trends in irrigation investment in China’s rural villages in the 2000s, identify the types of villages in which investment occurred and examine whether this investment had an impact on agricultural land. Design/methodology/approach – This...

Although preschool has been shown to improve children's school readiness in many developing countries, preschool attendance in poor rural areas of China is still low. The high cost of preschool is often regarded as a major barrier to attendance. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a...

When seeking to build high quality and cost-effective infrastructure in rural villages, a fundamental question is: Who is better at doing so? Should the village leadership or a government agency above the village finance and/or manage the construction of the infrastructure project? To answer...

This article studies whether or not health education programs targeting childhood anemia are sufficient for changing health behavior and nutrition in rural China. We conducted three different randomized-controlled trials of single and multiple face-to-face education sessions with parents and...

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...

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