does grassroots democracy reduce income inequality in china abstract using village and household survey data collected from 48 villages of eight chinese provinces for the period 1986 2002 this paper studies how the introduction of village elections affects income distribution at the village level we estimate both a static fixed effect panel model and a dynamic panel model for the within village gini coefficient and take care of the endogeneity of the introduction of elections the dynamic panel model shows that having elections reduces the gini coefficient by 0 04 or 14 3 of the sample average we also find that elections tend to increase the income shares of poorer portions of the population further econometric analysis based on dynamic panel models shows that elections increase per capita public expenditures by 271 yuan but do not increase the level or progressiveness of net or total income transfer in a village therefore elections positive role in reducing income inequality is not played through more income redistribution but through more pro poor public investment

access to markets and rural poverty evidence from household consumption in china abstract this paper presents evidence on the effects of access to domestic and international markets on per capita consumption of households using data from rural china the econometric analysis uses alternative identification schemes to address the potential endogeneity of access to markets we use straight line distances to coastline and navigable river along with the topography of the intervening counties as sources of exogeneous variations we also use identification through heteroskedasticity which does not rely on standard exclusion restrictions the results from alternative identification schemes show that better access to both domestic and international markets has positive effects on per capita consumption the domestic market effect is significantly larger in magnitude and there is complementarity between the access to domestic and international markets

optimal time based consolidation policy with price sensitive demand abstract we consider a single item inventory system where shipments are consolidated to reduce the transportation cost using a time based consolidation policy and develop a mathematical model to obtain the optimal price replenishment quantity and dispatch cycle to maximize the total profit the long run average profit is computed and the optimality properties are obtained using the optimality properties we develop an efficient algorithm to obtain the optimal values of price replenishment quantity and dispatch cycle for the proposed policy we then extend our results to consider quantity discount of unit dispatch cost in order to compare the performances of the proposed policy with the optimal quantity based policy extensive numerical experiments are conducted and the total profit and the customer waiting time that represents quality of service are compared we also propose the quantity time based policy which is a hybrid approach and the numerical results show that additional profit can be obtained without sacrificing quality of service

the effect of household wealth on fertiliser use in the presence of uncertainty abstractprevious studies of wealth effect on fertiliser use have produced mixed results on the direction of the impact our article looks at this issue from a different perspective by considering the presence of doubts such as about the true content or general effectiveness of fertiliser we show theoretically that there could be different responses between the high wealth and low wealth farmers we analyse also the wealth effect empirically using household panel data from the hebei province of china the results indicate that the direction of wealth effect does indeed change across the different levels of farmers wealth

analysis of an inventory system with exponential partial backordering abstract in this paper we study an inventory model with partial backlogging where unsatisfied demand is partially backlogged according to an exponential function in this model the total cost is the sum of the order cost the holding cost the backorder cost which includes a fixed cost and a cost proportional to the length of time for which the backorder exists and the cost of lost sales a general approach for finding the optimal policy is developed numerical examples are used to illustrate how the approach works

planning under incomplete information and the ratchet effect abstract central planning of production is usually performed under asymmetric information the firm in general has more information about its productive possibilities than the central planner from now on for short cp this justifies the use of incentives schemes in which the cp does not directly fix activity levels casual observation of such existing schemes suggests that the time dimensions is crucial for their working typically the cp revises the incentive scheme over time to take into account the information provided by the firm s performance managers of centrally planned economies as well as economists have long recognized that this revision induces firms to underproduce in order to avoid demanding schemes in the future this is the ratchet effect it is purpose of the present paper to study the ratchet effect under the non commitment assumption which we believe to be more realistic the inadequacy of conceptual tools made if difficult in the past to consider such an assumption now basic research on dynamic games with incomplete information recently resulted in new ideas which look particularly relevant for a theoretical analysis of the problem

the tale of the tails canadian income inequality in the 1980s and 1990s we present new evidence on levels and trends in after tax income inequality in canada between 1980 and 2000 we argue that existing data sources may miss changes in the tails of the income distribution and that many of the changes in the income distribution have been in the tails for this reason we turn to an alternative source in particular we construct data on after tax and transfer income using census files augmented with predicted taxes based on information available from administrative tax data using these data we find that canadian after tax inequality levels are substantially higher than has been previously recognized primarily because income levels are lower at the bottom of the distribution than in commonly used survey data we also find larger long term increases in after tax income inequality and far more variability over the economic cycle this raises interesting questions about the role of the tax and transfer system in mitigating both trends and fluctuations in market income inequality les auteurs presentent de nouveaux resultats sur les niveaux et tendances de l inegalite des revenus apres impots au canada entre 1980 et 2000 on suggere que les donnees existantes peuvent avoir ignore des changements dans les extremites de cette distribution alors que le gros des changements y etait concentre pour cette raison les auteurs se sont tournes vers une autre source de donnees ils ont construit une base de donnees sur les revenus apres impots et les paiements de transfert en utilisant les donnees du recensement ainsi que des donnees additionnelles sur les impots prevus a partir de renseignements disponibles dans les dossiers administratifs on decouvre que les niveaux d inegalite des revenus apres impots sont beaucoup plus eleves que ce qu on a suggere jusqu ici d abord parce que les niveaux de revenus sont plus bas au pied de la distribution que ne le suggerent les donnees d enquetes on decouvre aussi un accroissement plus grand a long terme de l inegalite des revenus apres impots et une plus grande variabilite au cours du cycle economique voila qui souleve des questions interessantes a propos du role de la fiscalite et du systeme de paiements de transfert dans la modulation de la tendance et des fluctuations dans l inegalite des revenus du marche

modeling a multi attribute utility newsvendor with partial backlogging abstract traditional newsvendor models usually focus on single profit maximization or cost minimization approaches however making a monetary estimate of the consequences of lost sales as a result of shortages is often a difficult task for many practitioners besides there is still a lack of an explicit account of decision making judgments on the multiple consequences of making decisions with regard to order quantities in order to deal with this problem this paper presents a multi attribute utility model for the newsvendor problem with regard to profit the impacts of service level on corporate image and on customers goodwill and the impact on the environment arising from the disposal of unsold products demand is partially backlogged according to a decreasing exponential function of the waiting time the fundamental principles and limitations related to the application of the model built are also discussed

international comparisons of welfare and poverty dominance orderings for ten countries inference based stochastic dominance procedures are applied to luxembourg income study data to rank ten western countries in terms of standards of living and poverty first order dominance comparisons ranks more than 50 percent of all pairwise comparisons and second order generalized lorenz dominance adds another 25 percent truncated dominance analysis is used to make inferences about poverty and up to 98 percent of the truncated distributions are ordered the results differ substantially from those obtained when only relative incomes and inequality are considered

the ratchet tautness and managerial behavior in soviet type economies suppose a manager receives a fixed bonus for reaching a target plus an overfulfillment reward each period the target is fixed by the manager s superiors in a manner that takes into account past performance this is the ratchet managers facing this incentive scheme will choose an activity level which takes into account the dynamic effects of current behavior on future earnings the conventional wisdom contends that managers will understate capacity by producing below maximum potential we show that this behavior occurs only under certain conditions more importantly we also show that the ratchet can be used to induce managers to reveal the growth rate of average capacity

when different market concentration indices agree abstract the herfindahl hirschman entropy and n firm indices may not agree when comparing market concentrations for different oligopoly markets the majorization pre ordering is shown to be both necessary and sufficient for all to agree

the impossibility of a progressive tax structure abstract when households are identical in all respects other than income a non decreasing average tax rate is both necessary and sufficient for post tax incomes to be always at least as equal as pre tax incomes this paper investigates whether this well known result can be extended to households with different needs a tax structure which never increases inequality in the lorenz sense is shown to be unable to discriminate between household types if in addition the tax structure never reduces the relative income of the poorest member of the neediest group of households then the same proportional tax must be applied to all households and redistribution is impossible either within or between groups of households with differing needs a similar conclusion is reached using conventional equivalence scale arguments and also applies when the parameters of the tax schedules are determined endogenously we discuss the significance of this impossibility result and its implications for tax design

an inventory model with partial backordering and unit backorder cost linearly increasing with the waiting time as the implementation of jit practice becomes increasingly popular each echelon in a supply chain tends to carry fewer inventories and thus the whole supply chain is made more vulnerable to lost sales and or backorders the purpose of this paper is to recast the inventory model to be more relevant to current situations where the penalty cost for a shortage occurrence at a downstream stage in a supply chain is continually transmitted to the upstream stages the supplier in this case at the upstream of the supply chain is responsible for all the downstream shortages due to the chain reaction of its backlog the current paper proposes a model in which the backorder cost per unit time is a linearly increasing function of shortage time and it claims that the optimal policy for the supplier is setting the optimal shortage time per inventory cycle to minimize its total relevant cost in a jit environment

rethinking inequality decomposition with evidence from rural china we examine inequality decompositions by income source and describe a general regression based approach for decomposing inequality the approach provides an efficient and flexible way to quantify the roles of variables like education and age in a multivariate context we illustrate the method using survey data from china the empirical results demonstrate how sharply different conclusions can emerge for different decomposition rules we explain how these differences reflect the treatment of equally distributed sources of income and we discuss implications for how results from inequality decomposition are interpreted a renewed interest in economic growth political economy and the distribution of income has again placed the economics of income inequality firmly on the academic research agenda relatively poor performances in latin america have been contrasted with success stories in east asia and recent evidence on the changing income distributions of emerging economic giants like china has

income inequality within and across counties in rural china 1988 and 1995 abstract using household data from samples covering 18 provinces in 1988 and 1995 income inequality within and between counties in rural china is assessed the approach enables us to aggregate average income and income inequality to the levels of provinces and the three regions comprising eastern central and western china most of income inequality in rural china in 1995 was found to be spatial and the uneven development of mean income across counties stood for most but not all of the rapid increase in income inequality mean income of the three regions diverged most forcefully

labor market participation of chinese agricultural households empirical evidence from zhejiang province abstract this work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of chinese farm households over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s using household data over the period 1986 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household farm and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers participate in one of four alternative labor market regimes as generally accepted off farm participation is the dominant form of farm households labor market participation but rural households show additionally a significant impact on rural employment mainly linked with non agricultural household business results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several family farm and village characteristics in particular we find education to be a key determinant of participation furthermore results point to a higher probability of female household members to take up off farm work

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

national wage trends and migration in a chinese village economy a micro level modeling approach based on a composite utility function china s economy is experiencing a regime shift away from a fully elastic supply of labor from a large pool of rural surplus labor and toward a situation of increasing labor scarcity and rising wage rates moreover faster wage increases in the regions of origin of many rural urban migrants are likely to affect the dynamics of inter regional migration these wage trends have implications at the local level in particular in a setting in which migration connects rural communities to the national labor market and in which migration is of high importance for the livelihoods of rural households taking a village perspective this article develops a village computable general equilibrium model to study local impacts of current wage trends in china as a central piece of the model the role of access to migration for household livelihoods is recognized access to migration is linked to household demographics and included in the model through a composite utility function that captures household preferences and disutilities associated with alternative off farm activities simulation results illustrate how households utility considerations affect migration responses to national wage changes statements about possible impacts on village level labor supply land use and agricultural production are made when migration wages and local off farm wages are simulated to increase an overall increase in household and village migration and a higher supply of labor to local off farm labor markets is accompanied by a contraction of farm production although land is reallocated between households with different migration responses total agricultural output declines

precautionary behavior migrant networks and household consumption decisions an empirical analysis using household panel data from rural china abstract we develop a test of precautionary behavior in the consumption decisions of rural agricultural households among surveyed households facing a median level of consumption risk 10 of savings can be attributed to a precautionary motive and this increases to 15 for households with consumption per capita below the poverty line we next use distant lags of local rainfall shocks uncorrelated with current consumption growth to identify the size of migrant networks outside the village and then present evidence that both poor and nonpoor households engage in less precautionary saving as the size of the village migrant network increases

the impact of food stamps on us poverty in the 1980s a marginal dominance analysis the relative effectiveness of the us food stamp program in reducing the incidence and depth of poverty is compared at a number of poverty lines across time the analysis is based upon an extension of dominance methods for ordering poverty recently developed statistical inference procedures and a merged data set that permnits an unusually comprehensive measure of income the comparative effectiveness of the food stamp program in reducing headcount poverty over time is contingent on the poverty line selected however the reduction in poverty gaps is greater in 1990 than in 1982 regardless of the poverty line chosen the sensitivity of the results to the income concept equivalence scale and time period used for measuring income are also considered

the evolution of income inequality in rural china abstract in this article we analyze trends in income inequality and the distribution of income in rural china from 1987 to 1999 we find an uneven but long run increase in inequality in rural china and show that nearly half of the rural population was not much better off in 1999 than at the start of the period we rule out geography as the most important factor for explaining income differences and the increases that occurred over time much more important were growing differences between households living in the same village province or region we also find that access to nonagricultural incomes from local wage employment and family businesses contributes to inequality but that employment outside the county in which a household lives and accessed through temporary migration is relatively equalizing finally we document important strengths and weaknesses of the primary data set used for our analyses relative to other data sources available for study of inequality and poverty in rural china

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

the measurement of inequality and poverty a policy maker s guide to the literature abstract mathematical measures of poverty and inequality embody values that reflect the historical political social intellectual and ethical forces prevalent at the time of their formulation so that policy makers may select measures of poverty and inequality that are consistent with their values it is important to make explicit the value judgements implicit in the measures models designed to measure poverty and inequality fall into four categories absolute poverty measures absolute income measures relative poverty measures and relative inequality measures this article examines the principal models within each category and discusses the assumptions limitations and values implicit in the models

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute abstract we provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non transferable the result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard hardy littlewood polya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute more specifically we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non increasing in the ordinal attribute we establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi ordering introduced by bourguignon 12 finally we show that if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations

note on inventory model with a mixture of back orders and lost sales abstract competitiveness is an important means of determining whether a company will prosper business organizations compete with one another in a variety of ways among these competitive methods are time and cost factors the purpose of this paper is to examine the inventory models presented by padmanabhan and vrat international journal of systems sciences 21 1990 1721 with a mixture of back orders and lost sales we develop the criterion for the optimal solution for the total cost function if the criterion is not satisfied this model will degenerate into one cycle inventory model with a finite inventory period this implies an extension of shortage period as long as possible to produce lower cost however we know that time is another important factor in company competitiveness customers will not indefinitely wait for back orders a tradeoff will be made between the two most important factors time and cost the minimum total cost is evaluated under the diversity cycle time and illustrations are applied to explain the calculation process this work provides a reference for decision makers

firms timing of production with heterogeneous consumers i revisit endogenous timing in a quantity setting duopoly game in the basic model i show that given strong heterogeneity in consumers willingness to pay wtp and a moderately small consumer segment with low wtp sequential moving outcomes can appear in equilibrium with the follower enjoying second mover advantage owing to consumer heterogeneity in wtp there is a local property that a firm s aggressive behaviour may lead to a competitor responding more aggressively hence the sequential moves can restrict firms total outputs to avoid a price collapse and result in firms strategic choices that pareto dominate those under the simultaneous move i further generalize my results and show that although firms compete in quantity under some conditions of the demand function features of strategic complements can appear

the impact of income components on the distribution of family incomes attempts have recently been made to assign inequality contributions to various components of income this paper discusses the issues involved in such assignments and highlights the problems that follow from having a number of possible decomposition rules u s data on the distribution of family incomes are used to examine the relative influence of these income components and to evaluate empirically the performance of different decomposition rules a wide range of inequality contributions can be obtained even when restricted to only naturally derived decomposition rules some of the results are plainly absurd and serve to warn against the indiscriminate use of decomposition formulae without first investigating their properties

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

an inventory control model with stochastic review interval and special sale offer abstract periodic review inventory models are widely used in practice especially for inventory systems in which many different items are purchased from the same supplier however most of periodic review models have assumed a fixed length of the review periods in practice it is possible that the review periods are of a random stochastic length this paper presents an inventory control model in the case of random review intervals and special sale offer from the supplier the replenishment interval is assumed to obey from two different distributions namely exponential and uniform distributions also shortages are allowed in the term of partial backordering for this model its convexity condition is discussed and closed form solutions are proposed

property rights labour markets and efficiency in a transition economy the case of rural china we investigate the consequences of imperfect factor market development for farm efficiency in north china we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative as opposed to market allocation of land combined with unevenly developed off farm opportunities using a new household survey we find considerable inefficiency in the use of labour this inefficiency is alleviated by external labour markets and to a limited degree by administrative reallocations the reallocations do not go far enough however which raises important questions about con straints on rental activity and property rights formation more generally jel classification q15 012

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

testing the significance of income distribution changes over the 1980s business cycle a cross national comparison using kernel density estimation we describe the distribution of household size adjusted real income and how it changed over the business cycle of the 1980s in the united states and the united kingdom we confirm previous studies that show income inequality increased in the two countries and the middle of the distribution was squashed down using a series of statistical tests however we find that while the mass in both tails of the distribution increased significantly in both countries over the period by far the greatest gains were in the upper tail copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

dollars and dreams a reduced middle class alternative explanations we decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male female differences in earnings inequality using canadian data our results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the

looking beyond averages in the trade and poverty debate there has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness as one aspect of globalization the paper views the issue through both macro and micro empirical lenses the macro lens uses cross country comparisons and aggregate time series data the micro lens uses household level data combined with structural modeling of the impacts of specific trade reforms case studies are presented for china and morocco both the macro and micro approaches cast doubt on some widely heard generalizations from both sides of the globalization debate additionally the micro lens indicates considerable heterogeneity in the welfare impacts of trade openness with both gainers and losers among the poor a number of covariates of the individual gains are identified the results point to the importance of combining trade reforms with well designed social protection policies

understanding the soft budget constraint we propose a clarification of the notion of a soft budget constraint a concept widely used in the analysis of socialist transitional and market economies our interpretation is broad enough to embrace most existing approaches to soft budget constraint phenomena and provides a classification of their causes and consequences in light of this interpretation we then review the theoretical literature on the subject and compare it with those on other dynamic commitment problems in economics

reranking and pro poor growth decompositions for china and vietnam abstract reranking in the move from one income distribution to another makes it impossible to infer from changes in lorenz and generalised lorenz curves how income growth among those toward the bottom of the initial income distribution compares to that among those toward the top and whether there has been income growth among those who were initially poor decompositions allowing for reranking indicate that economic growth in china and vietnam has been better for households who were initially poor than changes in the lorenz and generalised lorenz curve and poverty growth curve would suggest

how serious is the neglect of intrahousehold inequality in this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality they apply this framework to data for the philippines and conclude that 1 the result of neglecting intrahousehold inequality will probably be considerable understatement of the levels of poverty and inequality with the philippine data measured levels of inequality and poverty were off 30 percent as a result of ignoring intrahousehold variation and 2 patterns of inequality revealed by household level data are somewhat different from patterns revealed by individual level data but the differences seem not to be dramatic to confirm these results the exercise should be repeated with data from other countries

an inventory model with deteriorating items quantity discount pricing and time dependent partial backlogging abstract wee international journal of production economics 59 1999 511 in his interesting paper presented a deterministic inventory model with the following characteristics quantity discount schemes for the unit cost partial backlogging at a fixed rate deterioration of stock in time and demand rate being a linear function of the selling price in this article we generalize the work of wee 1999 more specifically we consider a model where the demand rate is a convex decreasing function of the selling price and the backlogging rate is a time dependent function which ensures that the rate of backlogged demand increases as the waiting time to the following replenishment point decreases

income distribution in urban china during the period of economic reform and globalization this paper addresses three issues that are central to understanding the effects of the transition in china from central planning to a more market oriented economic system first what have been the consequences of the economic reforms for the distribution of income in urban areas second what has happened to the incidence of urban poverty third have government policies helped to diminish or accentuate urban poverty and inequality answers to these questions are based on a comparison of two national sample surveys conducted in 1988 and 1995

inequality and conservation on the local commons a theoretical exercise to analyse the effect of asset inequality on co operation within a group we consider a twoplayer nonco operative model of conservation of a common pool resource overexploitation by one user affects another s payoff by reducing the next period catch we give necessary and sufficient conditions such that conservation is a nash equilibrium and show that increasing inequality does not in general favour full conservation however once inequality is sufficiently great further inequality can raise efficiency thus the relationship between inequality and economic efficiency is u shaped finally we analyse the implications for conservation if players have earning opportunities outside the commons the daily livelihood of vast masses of the rural poor in many countries depends on the success with which common pool resources cprs such as forest resources grazing lands in shore fisheries and irrigation water are managed and on the environmental consequences of their management understanding the factors that lead to success or failure of community management of these resources is thus critical to rural development cpr management is a collective action dilemma a situation in which mutual cooperation is collectively rational for the group as a whole but individual cooperation is not necessarily individually rational for each member one factor that has not always been recognised as critical to the outcome of collective action dilemmas is heterogeneity among the resource users in this paper our attention will be largely restricted to a single but potent kind of heterogeneity inequality in asset ownership olson 1965 hypothesised that inequality might favour the provision of a public good

rising regional inequality in china fact or artifact summary china s local populations can be counted in two ways people with hukou household registration from each place and people actually residing in each place for most of the first three decades of the reform era the hukou count denominated per capita gdp figures output and living standards were overstated in coastal provinces and understated in the interior the distortion grew bigger as the non hukou migrants increased to over 100 million much of the apparent increase in inter provincial inequality is a statistical artifact caused by this distortion the recent switch to using the resident count to denominate gdp introduced new distortions

markets and inequality in rural china parallels with the past after 30 years of egalitarian rhetoric and collectivist practice the introduction of market reforms to rural china entailed obvious risks for policymakers increases in average income might not compensate for the inequality generated by market based income determination concern for this possibility may help explain the slow relaxation of administrative control over the allocation of resources like land in order to evaluate the effect of market reforms we could begin by comparing the current gini coefficient to that which prevailed during the collective era see louis putterman 1993 for early evidence yet this might tell us little about the specific impact of market organization on income determination government policies such as collective land ownership mobility restrictions and fertility limits cloud the picture furthermore industrialization though itself a product of the reforms has changed the basis upon which individuals earn income isolating a pure effect of market organization is a difficult but important task since many current chinese policies reflect an ambivalent attitude toward decentralized market based resource allocation we offer a few suggestions on issues that need to be considered as this evaluation proceeds by exploring current inequality in rural northeast china from the vantage point of the 1930 s we begin with the observation that the level of inequality is similar in 1995 and 1935 and moreover that most contemporary inequality exists within villages as was the case in the 1930 s we then focus on two institu

chronic and transient poverty measurement and estimation with evidence from china abstract the paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways first it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components second it provides corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty third it applies these tools to the measurement of chronic and transient poverty in china using a rich panel data set that extends over 17 years alternative measurement techniques are found to yield significantly different estimates of the relative importance of chronic and transient poverty the precision of the estimates is also considerably enhanced by simple statistical corrections

the ratchet effect and the planner s expectations abstract this paper discusses the occurrence of the famous ratchet effect in a soviet type economy typically planners do not have a precise knowledge of the enterprise s capacities and plans may be viewed as the planner s expectations of these capacities whereas the existing models in the literature assume a rather crude version of the adaptive expectations hypothesis the case for the rational expectations hypothesis is argued here in order to assess the extent of the ratchet effect we compare four situations combining an adaptive versus rational planner with a manager who believes that plans are formed adaptively versus rationally with the help of a model describing the manager s behavior under these four polar assumptions it is shown that the presence of the ratchet effect strongly depends on the assumptions made about the planner s expectations

relative undernutrition in puerto rico under alternative food assistance programmes in the early 1980s puerto rico experienced a conversion from the food stamp program fsp to the nutrition assistance program nap and a severe recession to compare relative undernutrition in puerto rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions to separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated in the dominance comparisons every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile the multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile but a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low income households under the nap than under the fsp no evidence of signi

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

the decomposition of disturbances to national output of china the evidence of sectoral and regional shocks the chinese government has established policies to promote its industrial sectors and to develop coastal provinces since the late 1978 to investigate the extent and reason the output growth in china has been influenced by these policies an error component model is employed to decompose the importance of sectoral and regional shocks to variations in national output the results show that both sectoral specific shocks common across regions and regional specific shocks common across sectors are important in explaining the disturbance of national output in china specifically sectoral specific shocks consistently explain relatively more disturbance of chinese output than regional specific shocks do our empirical results are somewhat different from stockman 1988 and costello 1993 since they show almost equal explanatory power of sectoral and national shocks in accounting for national outputs in oecd countries

statistical inference for the measurement of the incidence of taxes and transfers we establish the asymptotic sampling distribution of general functions of quantile based estimators computed from samples that are not necessarily independent the results provide the statistical framework within which to assess the progressivity of taxes and benefits their horizontal inequity and the change in the inequality of income which they cause by the same token these findings characterise the sampling distribution of a number of popular indices of progressivity horizontal inequity and redistribution they can also be used to assess welfare and inequality changes using panel data and to assess poverty when it depends on estimated population quantiles we illustrate these results using micro data on the incidence of taxes and benefits in canada

sharing the cost of a public good an incentive constrained axiomatic approach we study the problem of provision and cost sharing of a public good in large economies where exclusion complete or partial is possible we search for incentive constrained efficient allocation rules that display fairness properties population monotonicity says that an increase in population should not be detrimental to anyone demand monotonicity states that an increase in the demand for the public good in the sense of a first order stochastic dominance shift in the distribution of preferences should not be detrimental to any agent whose preferences remain unchanged under suitable domain restrictions we give an explicit characterization of all incentive constrained efficient allocation rules we then show that there exists a unique incentive constrained efficient and demand monotonic allocation rule the so called serial rule in the binary public good case the serial rule is also the only incentive constrained efficient and population monotonic rule

calculation and decomposition of income inequality in low and middle income countries a survey data analysis this article estimates income inequality in a sample of four low and middle income lmi countries namely albania nepal tajikistan and tanzania using the household survey data nepal living st

asset based poverty transition and persistence in rural china this article tests empirically for transition and persistence of poverty in rural china based on the theory of asset based poverty traps it proposes an analytical framework mitigating the problem of endogenous switching between accumulation regimes and disentangling the true state dependence of poverty specifically a dynamic asset threshold separating households into downward and upward mobility regimes is identified after taking households unobserved characteristics and observed regime differentiated accumulation strategies into account the static analysis identifies causality running from settling into a downward mobility regime to the probability of poverty measured by consumption furthermore allowing for endogenous initial poverty status the dynamic analysis finds strong true state dependence in poverty households with the same characteristics are nearly twice as likely to be poor as if they had not previously switched to the accumulation regime assets below the dynamic threshold serve as a conduit through which poverty propagates itself factors that help to break this vicious circle are identified

impacts of migration on household production choices evidence from china abstractthe great migration from chinese farms to cities during the past several decades ranks among the most economically consequential of modern population movements we use a national sample of rice producing chinese households to examine the effects of that migration on agricultural production our assessment involves evaluating four alternative theories of labour market equilibrium in the framework of an expanded agricultural household model migration s farm production impacts appear to be slight not on account of farm labour market perfections or remittance financed technological improvements but by substituting a reduction in leisure and other low return activities for lost labour

village political economy land tenure insecurity and the rural to urban migration decision evidence from china this paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of china s rural residents a simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year after first demonstrating that a village leader s support for administrative land reallocation carries with it the risk of losing a future election the paper exploits election timing and village heterogeneity in lineage group composition and demographic change to identify the effect of land security in response to an expected land reallocation in the following year the probability that a rural resident migrates out of the county declines by 2 8 percentage points which accounts for 17 5 percent of the annual share of village residents aged 16 to 50 who worked as migrants during the period this finding underscores the potential importance of secure property rights for facilitating labor market integration and the movement of labor out of agriculture

urban income inequality in china revisited 1988 2002 abstract using newly available spatial price deflators this paper shows that inequality evaluations in the literature overstate the magnitude of inequality and inequality changes in china as well as the role played by regional differences in the recent inequality rise

geographic poverty traps a micro model of consumption growth in rural china how important are neighbourhood endowments of physical and human capital in explaining diverging fortunes over time for otherwise identical households in a developing rural economy to answer this question we develop an estimable micro model of consumption growth allowing for constraints on factor mobility and externalities whereby geographic capital can influence the productivity of a household s own capital our statistical test has considerable power in detecting geographic effects given that we control for latent heterogeneity in measured consumption growth rates at the micro level we find robust evidence of geographic poverty traps in farm household panel data from post reform rural china our results strengthen the equity and efficiency case for public investment in lagging poor areas in this setting copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

income distribution in the dynamic two factor trade model the issue of the effects of trade on personal income distribution has remained largely unexamined this paper describes an overlapping generations 2 x 2 model with a bequest motive and heterogeneous agents in order to examine the problem in this dynamic setting trade leads to both short run and long run reductions increases in inequality in labor capital abundant countries if the investment good is capital intensive if the consumption good is capital intensive the short run effects continue to hold but the long run effects are ambiguous copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

a multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual s welfare in china what is the role of health many economists have argued that income is an inadequate indicator of welfare in this paper we conduct a multivariate analysis of the distribution of individual welfare in china at three selected time points 1991 1997 and 2006 instead of using income as the only welfare indicator as in most distributional analyses we explicitly consider the role of health in welfare distribution we adopt the naga and geoffard 2006 decomposition method by which we can decompose a bidimensional welfare inequality index into two univariate atkinson kolm sen indices that measure the inequalities in health and income and a third term that measures the contribution from the joint distribution of the two attributes to total inequality we show that the third term might be used as an alternative to the concentration index to measure the income related inequality in health

a survey of deterministic models for the eoq and epq with partial backordering models for the basic deterministic eoq or epq problem with partial backordering or backlogging make all the assumptions of the classic eoq or epq model with full backordering except that only a fraction of the demand during the stockout period is backordered in this survey we review deterministic models that have been developed over the past 40 years that address the basic models and extensions that add other considerations such as pricing perishable or deteriorating inventory time varying or stock dependent demand quantity discounts or multiple warehouses

migrant labor markets and the welfare of rural households in the developing world evidence from china in this paper the authors examine the impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the consumption of rural households in china the authors find that increased migration from rural villages leads to significant increases in consumption per capita and that this effect is stronger for poorer households within villages household income per capita and non durable consumption per capita both increase with out migration and increase more for poorer households the authors also establish a causal relationship between increased out migration and investment in housing and durable goods assets and these effects are also stronger for poorer households the authors do not find robust evidence however to support a connection between increased migration and investment in productive activity instead increased migration is associated with two significant changes for poorer households increases both in the total labor supplied to productive activities and in the land per capita managed by the household in examining the effect of migration we pay considerable attention to developing and examining our identification strategy

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas

an economic order quantity model with partial backordering and a special sale price abstract a constant unit purchase cost is one of the main assumptions in the classic economic order quantity model in practice suppliers sometimes offer special sale prices to stimulate sales or decrease inventories of certain items in this paper we develop an eoq model with a special sale price and partial backordering we prove the convexity of the cost reduction function if a special order is placed at the special sale price a solution method is proposed and numerical examples are presented

some classes of functions that preserve the inequality and welfare orderings of income distributions abstract we identify in the paper those classes of functions that preserve the ranking of distributions according to three welfare criteria introduced recently by a f shorrocks economica 50 1983 3 17 we prove that a necessary and sufficient condition for a function to preserve the generalized lorenz ordering of distributions is that it be increasing and concave requiring welfare improvements to be compatible with more equality we obtain linear resp affine functions when emphasis is placed on relative resp absolute income differentials

backward and forward solutions for economies with rational expectations in models where anticipations of future endogenous variables influence current behavior there exists an infinity of solutions under the assumption of rational expectations this problem has been dealt with in the study of macro economic models by the implicit or explicit use of one of three additional requirements optimality consistency with alleged economic behavior or conformity of the endogenous variables to an imposed stationarity condition these requirements have coincided in existing models leading to the choice of a unique solution a forward solution the purpose of this paper is to review the problem characterize the solutions and examine whether these requirements are acceptable section i presents a simple model and derives the set of solutions the model makes no claim to generality but has the major advantage that the issues are easily understood in this simple case section ii discusses the requirement of consistency with economic behavior section iii discusses the requirement of stationarity and section iv provides some conclusions