urban bias rural bias or state bias urban rural relations in post revolutionary china the authors aim to evaluate the relevance of urban bias and rural bias to the chinese case they present empirical evidence on the nature and extent of differentiation in rural urban living standards examine the political basis of relevant economic policies and investigate the relationship between these policies both the changes in labour productivity in each sector and the inter sectoral savings transfers both urban and rural bias hypotheses illuminate certain dimensions of chinese development strategy but the realities of rural urban relations have been complex and analysis must be supplemented by a focus on the divide between state and society and the question of state bias

the institutional causes of china s great famine 1959 1961 this paper studies the causes of china s great famine during which 16 5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas we document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food production a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years we provide evidence that an inflexible and progressive government procurement policy where procurement could not adjust to contemporaneous production and larger shares of expected production were procured from more productive regions was necessary for generating this pattern and that this policy was a quantitatively important contributor to overall famine mortality

energy consumption in service industries challenging the myth of non materiality abstract this paper addresses the issue of energy consumption in service industries official energy statistics show that the amount of energy consumed in service industries is quite small and this is explained in the theoretical literature by the presumed intangibility of services our hypothesis however is that the energy consumed by services has been underestimated after identifying and analyzing the full range of sources of energy consumption in service industries we show that official energy statistics account for only a part of this consumption our work is based on a thorough rereading of the economics literature on services especially concerning the definition of services and the specificities of the service provision process done in light of our knowledge about energy consumption eventually using the 2007 french national transportation and travel survey we estimate one of the overlooked sources of energy consumption the one pertaining to mobility

rural urban disparity and sectoral labour allocation in china this study examines china s rural urban segmentation and its causes in the context of economic reforms household survey and aggregate data indicate a v shaped process in which rural urban consumption and income differentials decreased between 1978 and 1985 but then have continually increased to historically high levels this sectoral division is consistent with production function estimates based on provincial data that reveal higher labour productivity in urban state owned industries than in rural industries and agriculture to explain the v shaped change we argue that the precedent of successful rural reforms raised farmers relative earnings but the remaining obstacles to an efficient sectoral allocation of labour have prevented china from eliminating dualism recent financial policies consisting of urban price subsidies and increased investment credits have also had influential distribution effects that are biased against the rural sector

evidence on the political economy of the urbanization process urbanization and economic development go hand in hand as a country moves from a rural agricultural base to an urban industrial base this paper argues that urbanization per se occurs in response to the basic sector shift out of agriculture and government policies such as price controls and trade protection of industry affect the process only indirectly through their effect on sector composition however urban concentration the extent to which a country s urban resources are concentrated in one or two large cities as opposed to more evenly spread is much more directly affected by policies and politics the paper finds specifically that investments in inter regional infrastructure facilitates urban deconcentration away from primate to hinterland cities as does increasing democratization or increasing fiscal decentralization the findings move beyond establishing basic correlations in the data to trying to quantify causal effects in a panel framework with instrumental variables estimation

spatial aspects of chinese development issues outcomes and policies 1949 79 despite wide initial spatial inequalities and a respectable rate of national economic growth since 1949 available evidence suggests that certain key spatial inequalities in china have narrowed progress has been uneven however and there is no simple correlation to be found between the pursuit of maoist regional policies and the narrowing of spatial inequalities that actually occurred this points to the need to qualify the conclusion of many western scholars that maoist policies actually succeeded in achieving rapid sustainable growth while narrowing most differentials including spatial differentials

state and peasant in contemporary china the political economy of village government this is a study of peasant state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state s attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state defined surplus to provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant state relations over almost a forty year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978 1 have divided my analysis into two parts chapters 2 through 7 are on maoist china and chapters 8 and 9 are on post mao china the first part examines the state s grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized maoist period when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales tonggou tongxiao the second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978 when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program

immiserizing deindustrialization a dynamic trade model with credit constraints abstract the paper develops an open economy dynamic model with bequests and credit constraints the agricultural sector uses only labor the industrial sector needs an indivisible investment under autarky productive agriculture provides the funds needed for investment in industry and in equilibrium credit constraints are not binding if agriculture is not sufficiently productive the price of the industrial good must be high enough to make the industrial sector sustainable in an open economy if the country has the comparative advantage in agriculture deindustrialization may occur over time deindustrialization is welfare reducing when the negative wealth distributional effects swamp the gains from trade

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

did higher inequality impede growth in rural china this paper estimates the relationship between initial village inequality and subsequent household income growth for a large sample of households in rural china using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years 1987 2002 and controlling for an array of household and village characteristics the paper finds that households located in higher inequality villages experienced significantly lower income growth through the 1990s however local inequality s predictive power and effects are significantly diminished by the end of the sample the paper exploits several advantages of the household level data to explore hypotheses that shed light on the channels by which inequality affects growth biases due to aggregation and heterogeneity of returns to own resources previously suggested as candidate explanations for the relationship are both ruled out instead the evidence points to unobserved village institutions at the time of economic reforms that were associated with household access to higher income activities as the source of the link between inequality and growth the empirical analysis addresses a number of pertinent econometric issues including measurement error and attrition but underscores others that are likely to be intractable for all investigations of the inequality growth relationship

the post collective village a tale of two transitions summary this paper provides an ethnographic look at economic change in rural areas of remote regions of russia and china while the structural conditions of agriculture at the outset of reform partially explain the dramatically different trajectories of reform seen in my study sites the current state of economic stagnation or economic development in these areas should not primarily be seen as a legacy of pre reform conditions it is largely the economic policies pursued by the russian and chinese governments that have created or failed to create the conditions that enable post socialist farmers to take advantage of market opportunities

urban employment and labour allocation policies in post mao china abstract china s leadership has faced serious urban unemployment and inefficient state labour allocation systems their drive to increase employment through economic readjustment makes developmental sense and the quantitative results appear impressive but the problem of urban labour surplus defies solution in the short term given population pressures planning weaknesses economic constraints and ideological proscriptions efforts to improve the allocation and utilization of labour have foundered because they contradict employment policy and are opposed by key urban groups these issues throw into relief the complex relationships between economic and political determinants in the chinese reform process

the effects of well management and the nature of the aquifer on groundwater resources we compare groundwater use under collective well management in china where village leaders allocate water among households and under private well management where farmers either pump from their own wells or buy water from wells owned by other farmers villages are divided into connected or isolated groups depending on whether there are lateral groundwater flows between aquifers underlying a village and neighboring ones in rural china households under collective well management use less water even under collective management households located in connected villages use more water indicating that the connectedness of the aquifers may undermine leaders incentives to conserve water

reform and urban bias in china income inequalities between urban and rural areas remain high in china but the gap has begun to narrow peasant incomes have increased dramatically since the post mao reforms rural areas have new power but this is a consequence not a cause of the reforms the improvement in rural conditions reflects a change in the central state s development strategy and ideology and the local response to incentives embedded in china s reforms the impetus for these changes is self preservation of the state and the chinese communist party the failure to close decisively the income disparities between the urban and rural areas similarly stems from concerns of regime stability and preservation of the party state

government control or low carbon lifestyle analysis and application of a novel selective constrained energy saving and emission reduction dynamic evolution system abstract this paper explores a novel selective constrained energy saving and emission reduction eser dynamic evolution system analyzing the impact of cost of conserved energy cce government control low carbon lifestyle and investment in new technology of eser on energy intensity and economic growth based on artificial neural network the quantitative coefficients of the actual system are identified taking the real situation in china for instance an empirical study is undertaken by adjusting the parameters of the actual system the dynamic evolution behavior of energy intensity and economic growth in reality are observed with the results in perfect agreement with actual situation the research shows that the introduction of cce into eser system will have certain restrictive effect on energy intensity in the earlier period however with the further development of the actual system carbon emissions could be better controlled and energy intensity would decline in the long run the impacts of cce on economic growth are positive government control and low carbon lifestyle play a decisive role in controlling eser system and declining energy intensity but the influence of government control on economic growth should be considered at the same time and the controlling effect of low carbon lifestyle on energy intensity should be strengthened gradually while the investment in new technology of eser can be neglected two different cases of eser are proposed after a comprehensive analysis the relations between variables and constraint conditions in the eser system are harmonized remarkably a better solution to carry out eser is put forward at last with numerical simulations being carried out to demonstrate the results

the causal factors of international inequality in hbox co _ 2 emissions per capita a regression based inequality decomposition analysis this paper uses the possibilities provided by the regression based inequality decomposition fields in res labor econ 22 1 38 2003 to explore the contribution of different explanatory factors to international inequality in hbox co 2 emissions per capita in contrast to previous emissions inequality decompositions which were based on identity relationships this methodology does not impose any a priori specific relationship thus it allows an assessment of the contribution to inequality of different relevant variables in short the paper appraises the relative contributions of affluence sectoral composition demographic factors and climate the analysis is applied to selected years of the period 1993 2007 the results show the important though decreasing share of the contribution of demographic factors as well as a significant contribution of affluence and sectoral composition

credit constraints and human capital accumulation in the open economy abstract this paper analyzes the implications of capital market imperfections for understanding the causes and consequences of international trade credit constraints in financing education and exogenous income distribution affect patterns of comparative advantage and are crucial in determining the impact of international trade unlike the standard results in the trade literature in the model here trade liberalization in a skill scarce country leads to higher investments in human capital

elite opportunity in transitional economies command economies gave communist era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth markets and privatization have injected new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders these opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent pace and form of privatization and the concentration and liquidity of assets different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which prior elites obtain ownership or control of privatized assets use political office to extract larger incomes move into salaried elite occupations or fall out of the elite altogether regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations elite positions and assets this elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on central europe china and russia and yields predictions for other regions

innovation in services the purpose of this article is to lay the foundations of a theory that can be used to interpret innovation processes in the service sector the hypothesis underpinning this article is based on lancaster s definition of the product in both manufacturing and services as a set of service characteristics the article follows the example of those who have sought to apply lancaster s work to technological phenomena various modes of innovation in the service sectors are highlighted and illustrated