China enacted a rural tax reform – the "Tax-for-Fee Reform" (TFR) – in the late 1990s. A crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform improved farmers' welfare in rural areas. This paper uses village-level survey data from the Chinese Household Income Project in order to...

In the late 1990s, China enacted a rural tax reform known as the "Tax-for-Fee Reform" (TFR), largely driven by a desire to address farmers' complaints about what they perceived as a heavy and regressive tax burden. This study examines the impact of the TFR on inequality in rural villages in...