Increased regional inequality has been a major concern in many emerging economies like China, India, Vietnam and Thailand. However, even a large inequality is observed within the lagging regions. The objective of this paper is to look into what are the sources of within region inequality using...

Using a census survey of households in Guizhou Province, this paper examines the patterns of village poverty and inequality and their major correlates. The results show that poverty incidences vary greatly among villages and inequality is relatively high within villages in these impoverished...

There have been competing arguments about the effect of public infrastructure on productivity. Level-based and debate-based regressions often lead to different estimates. To help reconcile this difference, this article applies the GMM method to first test for causality to check for length of...

Since the early nineties, tens of thousands of villages have held elections of their leaders in rural China. Using a recent village survey, this paper empirically examines the impact of election on public goods provision to the rural community. We found that elected officials tend to tax less on...

The objective of this paper is to analyze how agricultural research and development have affected urban poverty using China as an example. Agricultural research lower food prices, and therefore help urban poor by lowing their food cost.

Few studies have systematically documented the interdependency among different types of public goods and their impact on economic development. This papers aims to develop a methodological framework to evaluate the degree of interdependency and identify the weakest link of public goods provisions...