This study seeks to explain the differences in infrastructure quality across China’s villages. Using primary data on three main types of infrastructure projects in rural China, we find that a.) between-project within-village quality differences are small and project design has little...

There is little evidence showing whether health information transmitted via text messages can change health and educational outcomes. We conducted a randomized field experiment involving 900 primary students in rural China to study whether a health education campaign conducted via text message...

Purpose – With the rise in the opportunity to go to college, the purpose of this paper is to identify if China's rural poor are being excluded from the university system, and if so, why. Design/methodology/approach – Two sets of the authors' own primary survey data were used: a group of...

Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency...

China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China’s key challenge is whether it can become competitive in quasi-skilled and skilled industrial sectors so...

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in...

Despite the rise in grade retention in poor areas in rural China recently, little work has been done to understand the impact of grade retention on the educational performance of students in these areas in rural China. This paper seeks to redress this shortcoming and examines the effect of grade...