the distribution of income in china preface notes on the contributors introduction k griffin z renwei part 1 the distribution of income household income and its distribution a r khan k griffin c riskin z renwei three features of the distribution of income during the transition to reform z renwei part 2 income and wealth in rural china the determinants of household income in rural china a r khan the distribution of wealth in rural china t mckinley income distribution and poverty in rural china c riskin part 3 employment and human capital workers in china s rural industries j knight s lina why urban wages differ in china j knight s lina the determinants of educational attainment j knight l shi annex the 1988 household sample survey m eichen z ming index

disagreement in expectations and the credibility of monetary authorities in the brazilian inflation targeting regime abstract based on market expectations reported by the central bank of brazil for the selic interest rate the ipca inflation the exchange rate brl usd and the growth rate of industrial production for four different forecasting horizons this work analyzes the term structures of disagreement in expectations regarding the future values of these variables it also investigates the driving factors of disagreement paying special attention to the influence of monetary authorities credibility an extensive regression analysis shows that the levels of the term structures of disagreement are negatively related to the output gap although this result is not very robust and that the levels of the term structures of disagreement in expectations about the ipca inflation rate and the selic interest rate have a strong negative relationship with central bankers credibility this relationship is positive in the case of the growth rate of industrial production

the market transition debate toward a synthesis in his seminal 1989 article a theory of market transition victor nee offered a new theory of social inequality and applied it to the study of the problem of transition from state socialist redistributive economy to market capitalism nee claimed that the emergence of markets in state socialist redistributive economies had unexpected consequences the most privileged stratum or class of state socialism the redistributors lost some of their privilege while those at the bottom of the state socialist hierarchy the direct producers benefited for earlier formulations see szelenyi and konrad 1969 szelenyi 1978 and whyte 1984 as a result inequality as measured by income or access to scarce goods was reduced nee s theory identified the mechanisms by which markets generated equality under redistributive systems if wages are not administratively set but established by transactive relations then producers are likely to have more power market power if markets operate then human capital is likely to be rewarded more while political loyalty is likely to matter less market incentive if there are markets in a redistributive economy then entrepreneurship becomes an alternative avenue of socioeconomic mobility market opportunity nee 1989 data collected in 1985 in rural china offered support to the theory of market transition between 1977 and 1985 overall income inequalities in china declined the income gap between urban residents and farmers shrank the income gap in the countryside between peasants and cadres also narrowed the decline of inequality arguably was the result of deregulation of state policies in agriculture after 1977 chinese peasants received land their production targets were less strictly regulated by planners and they were allowed to bring their produce to urban markets as

formation of inflation expectations in british manufacturing industries over the past decade increasing use has been made of direct information on price expectations in empirical studies of the expectations formation process in the united states livingston s inflation expectation series have been extensively analysed by turnovsky i970 turnovsky and wachter i972 pesando i975 mcguire i976 carlson i977 mullineaux i978 i980 jacobs and jones i980 figlewski and wachter i98i and others in the united kingdom the general public expectations of consumer prices made available in the gallup polls have been studied by carlson and parkin i975 holden and peel i977 smith i982 severn 1983 and evans and gulamani i984 similar studies have also been carried out with respect to surveys conducted in germany france and most other oecd countries however despite the apparent importance of businessmen s expectations for the understanding of the inflationary process the empirical research on inflation expectations in the united kingdom has been mainly concerned with the consumers price expectations the present paper is an attempt to rectify this shortcoming by extending the empirical analysis of the inflation expectation process to british manufacturing industries using the results of the industrial trend surveys conducted by the confederation of british industries cbi the plan of the paper is as follows section i deals with the methodological problems of deriving quantitative inflation expectations series from qualitative responses such as the ones reported in the cbi surveys the subjective probability method due to theil carlson and parkin and the regression method recently proposed by the author pesaran i984 for the conversion of categorical responses to quantitative measures are briefly discussed section ii sets out the alternative models of inflation expectations formation section iii describes the data on inflation expectations in british manufacturing industries and discusses the forecasting value of alternative measures of inflation expectations section iv focuses on the issue of measurement errors in expectations and the econometric problems involved section v reports the results of estimation of alternative models of inflation expectations and investigates the quantitative impact of government policy and general economic conditions on inflation

search frictions matching aggregate and establishment observations abstract we estimate a search model to match hours employment vacancies and unemployment at the micro and macrolevels we establish a set of facts concerning the variability of unemployment and vacancies in the aggregate and the distribution of net employment growth and the comovement of hours and employment growth at the establishment level a search model with non convex costs of posting vacancies establishment level profitability shocks and a contracting framework to set hours provides a structure to understand these observations the estimated model is able to capture both the aggregate and establishment level facts

can we improve the perceived quality of economic forecasts a number of topics are discussed concerning how economic forecasts can be improved in quality or at least in presentation these include the following using 50 uncertainty intervals rather than 95 noting that even though forecasters use many different techniques they are all occasionally incorrect in the same direction that there is a tendency to underestimate changes that some expectations and recently available data are used insufficiently lagged forecasts errors can help compensate for structural breaks series that are more forecastable could be emphasized and that present methods of evaluating forecasts do not capture the useful properties of some methods compared to alternatives

optimal degree of public information dissemination financial markets and macroeconomic environments are often characterised by positive external ities in these environments transparency may reduce expected welfare public announcements serve as focal points for higher order beliefs and affect agentsbehaviour more than justified by their informational contents some scholars conclude that reducing public signalsprecision or entirely withholding information may improve welfare this article shows that public information should always be provided with maximum precision but under certain conditions not to all agents restricting the degree of publicity is a better suited instrument for preventing the negative welfare effects of public announcements than restrictions on their precision are there is a general presumption that higher central bank transparency in terms of information disclosure to a wider audience improves the effectiveness of monetary policy and is beneficial to markets as it reduces information asymmetries helps to assess risk better and arrive at more informed decisions thus enhancing market efficiency while practitioners in central banks and international institutions agree on the desirability of informative announcements and promote higher transparency on the ground that any information is valuable to markets recent academic literature distin guishes private and public information and argues that public announcements may destabilise markets and reduce efficiency by their effects on higher order beliefs if markets are characterised by positive externalities morris and shin 2002 henceforth m s have shown that noisy public announcements may be detrimental to welfare from an ex ante point of view they conclude that a commitment to withholding relevant information or deliberately reducing its precision may be welfare enhancing in this article we challenge this conclusion by distinguishing two components of transparency precision ofinformationanddegreeofpublicity the degreeof publicity is the proportion of agents who receive a signal using a stylised coordination game introduced by m s we show that information should always be provided to the market

market transition and the persistence of power the changing stratification system in urban china research on transitional socialist societies has explored trends in income inequality and issues concerning who gains and who loses during market reforms we find that income inequality in a major chinese city declined only slightly during the first decade of reform policies it then increased dramatically in the subsequent five years strategic position in the state bureaucracy continues to be an important determinant of income although connections to the market system are becoming alternate sources of advantage we interpret these findings in light of the historical and institutional context of urban china

a theory of market transition from redistribution to markets in state socialism state socialist redistributive economies are characterized by the allocation and distribution of goods through central planning this paper develops a theory of market transition which argues that in reforming socialist economies the transition from redistributive to market coordination shifts sources of power and privilege to favor direct producers relative to redistributors the shit improves incentives for direct producers stimulates the growth of private markets and provides to entrepreneurs an alternative path for socioeconomic mobility a set of hypotheses test the market transition theory with householdand village level data

disagreement and biases in inflation expectations empirical work documents substantial disagreement in inflation expectations obtained from survey data furthermore the extent of such disagreement varies systematically over time in a way that reflects the level and variance of current inflation this paper oers a simple explanation for these facts based on asymmetries in the forecasters costs of over and under predicting inflation our model implies biased forecasts with positive serial correlation in forecast errors and a cross sectional dispersion that rises with the level and the variance of the inflation rate it also implies that forecast errors at dierent horizons can be predicted through the spread between the short and long term variance of inflation we find empirically that these patterns are present in inflation forecasts from the survey of professional forecasters a constant bias component not explained by asymmetric loss and rational expectations is required to explain the shift in the sign of the bias observed for a substantial portion of forecasters around 1982

getting ahead in urban china this article argues that structural segmentation is a universal phenomenon in all complex societies and across political economies each political economy uses specific criteria in delineating segments of its economic and work organizations furthermore it is argued that segmentation identification constitutes a critical destination status for individuals engaged in the status attainment process a representative sample of the working population in tianjin china is analyzed to show that entrance into the core sectors state agencies and enterprises rather that the job per se constitutes the primary goal of status attainment entering into a more desirable work unit sector in china takes on differential significance and process for males and females formales the direct effect of intergenerational factors i e the effect of father s work unit sector is evident for females such an effect is only indirect instead to a great extent their status attainment also upward occupational mobility acr

the emergence of a market society changing mechanisms of stratification in china this article examines the effect of institutional change the shift from redistribution to markets in altering the mechanisms of stratification new institutionalists maintain that interests are emb

the start up gap and jobs the present paper uses quarterly data from the social security registry covering the full population of belgian firms to analyze how the secular decline in the firm entry rate affects aggregate employment to this end we disentangle the entry margin into two channels the overall employment of new firms the start up employment and the share of start up employment by sector the sectoral composition of start ups we find that the decline in start up employment slowed down the growth rate of aggregate employment by 26 over the 2009q2 2017q1 period by shifting the age distribution of firms toward older firms the sectoral composition of start ups accelerated the decline in the manufacturing sector and prevented the distribution sector from a potential decline while leaving the aggregate employment unchanged

effects of transparency monetary policy signalling and clarity of central bank communication on disagreement about inflation expectations abstractthe literature on transparency and central bank communication and the literature on disagreement about expectations are evolving however both have been evolving separately despite the advances in the literature several key issues remain open and there are gaps to be filled therefore this study analyses the effects of monetary policy signalling and clarity of central bank communication on disagreement about inflation expectations it also investigates whether greater transparency coincides with lower levels of disagreement in inflation expectations in brazil the findings suggest that transparency is important to reduce disagreement about inflation expectations moreover our estimates indicate that central bank communication and clarity affect disagreement about inflation expectations in brazil

social inequalities in reforming state socialism between redistribution and markets in china this article extends market transition theory to an analysis of inequality under the conditions of partial reform in china logit regression analysis indicates cadres officials have no greater odds than other households of being among the privileged or avoiding poverty entrepreneurs andformer team cadres however are advantaged despite the rise of a hybrid elite of entrepreneurs who are currently cadres that capitalizes on redistributive power to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace increases in income inequality are modest when market reform stimulates improved economic performance the poor appear to benefit and experience comparable improvements in household income as a result there is only a slight increase in inequality at least in the early stages of market reform the empirical analysis is based on survey data collected in rural china in 1985

central bank communication and monetary policy a survey of theory and evidence over the last two decades communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy these real world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication mostly empirical and almost all of it written in this decade we survey this ever growing literature the evidence suggests that communication can be an important and powerful part of the central bank s toolkit since it has the ability to move financial markets to enhance the predictability of monetary policy decisions and potentially to help achieve central banks macroeconomic objectives however the large variation in communication strategies across central banks suggests that a consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes an optimal communication strategy

disagreement in inflation expectations empirical evidence for colombia the literature on expectation disagreements in emerging economies is scarce this paper examines the disagreements in inflation expectations for the colombian economy during the 2010 2017 period w

the global and local dimensions of place making remaking shanghai as a world city shanghai the largest socialist industrial city in china is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces this paper provides a preliminary account of remaking this city into a world city the case study suggests the tremendous and pervasive impact of globalisation on the city in transitional economies although it is still not comparable with a truly global city the growth of inward investment particularly its penetration into real estate development has exerted direct impacts on the urban structure it is argued that however that this global influence can only be realised through the coincidence of indigenous changes in the political economy system specifically the willingness of the central government to give more autonomy to local governments the new policy to set up a window for china s open policy the incentive for making money from selling the space the injection of public money into infrastructure and fierce promotional development strategies all contributed to the process of urban restructuring the effect of combined global and local changes has led to an extremely optimistic growth atmosphere and a building boom since the mid 1990s shanghai highlights the local as well as the global dimensions of urban change in the post socialist economies

opportunistic and deliberate disinflation under imperfect credibility one strategy for disinflation prescribes a deliberate path towards low inflation a contrasting opportunistic approach eschews deliberate action and instead waits for unforeseen shocks to reduce inflation this paper compares the ability of these two approaches to achieve disinflation and at what cost we analyze these issues using the federal reserve s frb us model which allows alternative assumptions to be made about expectations held by agents in the economy hence the credibility of the central bank can be considered in assessing the cost of deliberate and opportunistic disinflations

canadian inflation targeting this paper examines the intellectual environment in canada that led to the adoption of inflation targets starting in 1991 reviews some of the canadian contributions to the vast literature on inflation targeting and presents evidence in support of the view that the implementation of inflation targeting in canada has been particularly successful when compared with the experiences of other inflation targeting countries and the us

assessing inflation expectations anchoring for heterogeneous agents analysts businesses and trade unions forecasts of agents who are actively involved in the setting of prices and wages are less readily available than those of professional analysts but may be more relevant for understanding inflation

property rights and stratification in socialist redistributive economies in socialist economies work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to ex plain such inequalities in market economies existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power in this paper i sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights the right to derive income from productive assets two aspects of property rights guide the analysis 1 the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of governmentjurisdictions and 2 the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues primarily through taxation extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the out puts of the organization variation in revenue extraction in turn creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees an analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of tianjin china provides provisional support for these ideas s tudents of communist states have had little reason to dispute lenski s 1966 claim that the distribution of rewards in a society is a func tion of the distribution of power p 63 as ex emplified in szelenyi s wedding of elite theory to institutional economics this idea has been de veloped primarily in terms of the power of class es or occupational groups szelenyi 1978 be gan with the observation that planned economies operate according to redistributive rather than market principles however the process of re

the first shall be last entrepreneurship and communist cadres in the transition from socialism this article reviews the sociological literature on the transition from socialism to capitalism it distinguishes between the erosion and transition phases and between traditional and corporate segments in the emerging private sector panel survey data from hungary show that during the transition ex communist cadres maintain their advantageous position and do especially well in the more dynamic corporate segment they are successful because human capital is important in both capitalism and socialism and because the cadres are able to convert past political power to economic advantage contrary to the findings of studies based only on agriculture the transition increases income inequalities

changing business dynamism and productivity shocks vs responsiveness the pace of job reallocation has declined in the united states in recent decades we draw insight from canonical models of business dynamics in which reallocation can decline due to i lower dispersion of idiosyncratic shocks faced by businesses or ii weaker marginal responsiveness of businesses to shocks we show that shock dispersion has actually risen while the responsiveness of business level employment to productivity has weakened moreover declining responsiveness can account for a significant fraction of the decline in the pace of job reallocation and we find suggestive evidence this has been a drag on aggregate productivity

optimal central bank transparency should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further we show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency up to this optimum more transparency is desirable it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts but beyond the optimum people might 1 start to attach too much weight to the conditionality of their forecasts and or 2 get confused by the large and increasing amount of information they receive this deteriorates the perceived quality of private sector inflation forecasts as a result inflation is set in a more backward looking manner resulting in higher inflation persistence by using a large scale panel data set on the transparency of central banks we find empirical support for an optimal intermediate degree of transparency at which inflation persistence is minimized our results indicate that while several central banks would benefit from further transparency increases some already have reached the optimal level

economic transition and urban transformation of china the interplay of the state and the market the transition of the chinese economy from plan to market has led to dramatic economic restructuring and urban transformation since the economic reforms and open door policy in 1978 the state and the market which are the two basic regulating mechanisms have significantly changed their role in economic and urban development in this transition in china we attempt to examine the interplay of the state and the market in facilitating economic growth and producing new urban space after replacing socialism with state capitalism four major waves of urbanisation and urban development have been identified in terms of the interaction of the state and the market in producing different forms of urban development which also bring about economic transition in china we further examine the new form of urban development in the fourth stage of urbanisation which is represented by the rapid growth of producer services and the resulting development of central business districts economic transition and urban transfor

shocks versus responsiveness what drives time varying dispersion the dispersion of many economic variables is countercyclical what drives this fact greater dispersion could arise from greater volatility of shocks or from agents responding more to shocks of con

china s changing urban governance in the transition towards a more market oriented economy china s changing urban development processes and urban landscapes in the transition towards a more market oriented economy have received extensive research attention in recent years relatively the governing of chinese cities is still underresearched this article aims to analyse the forces released both inside and outside the formal socialist state system and the impacts on phenomenal restructuring of urban governance especially at local levels marketisation has created new elements beyond the reach of state work units that represent the state s hierarchical control the pillars of the socialist governing structure the party state the work units system and household registration are shaken by these forces the changes in the organisation of people capital production materials infrastructure and space fundamentally demand new urban governance territorial organisations such as the municipality urban districts street office and residents committees are reinvented and consolidated to restore a governable society the devolution towards the base level and the reinvention of local communities reflect the state s attempt to reconsolidate its power to create a governable society as well as to cope with practical pressures such as the provision of social assistance to poor and aged residents re employment of laid off workers and the management of floating immigrants the combination of new market elements and decentralised state apparatus has given rise to the entrepreneurial endeavour of china s governance this research highlights the micro foundation of the new urban governance in addition to the globalisation capital mobility city competitiveness thesis

sources of disagreement in inflation forecasts an international empirical investigation abstract central to the conduct of monetary policy are inflation forecasts inflation forecasts are not unique central banks and professional organizations generate inflation forecasts while households are surveyed about their inflation outlook this paper estimates inflation forecast disagreement for nine economies over the 1999 2009 period five of which target inflation i find that central bank transparency tends to increase forecast disagreement to the extent this reflects the attention paid to inflation performance the implication is that transparency is beneficial moreover this finding does not appear to be a feature that applies only to central banks that must adhere to an inflation target

revolution reform and status inheritance urban china 1949 1996 do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility china s political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways during its first three decades the regime enforced unusually restrictive barriers to elite status inheritance and during the subsequent market transition unlike most of its counterparts the communist party survived intact data from a multigeneration survey suggest that despite their obvious exclusion from the party and related administrative careers in the mao era certain prerevolution elites transmitted one type of elite status to their offspring to a surprising degree party elites in contrast were hit hard by radical maoism but recovered quickly afterward and their offspring inherited elite status at much higher rates

directional analysis of consumers forecasts of inflation in a small open economy evidence from south korea abstractwe evaluate the directional accuracy of consumers forecasts of inflation in predicting the movement of the actual cpi in a small open economy in order to do so we use a method developed by pesaran and timmermann 2009 based on south korean data by illustrating an application of the new market timing test we show that consumers expectations of inflation are not a useful predictor of the cpi in south korea our findings suggest that the directional accuracy of consumers 1 year ahead forecasts of inflation is not affected by the inflation targeting of the bank of korea our findings also suggest that consumers 1 year ahead forecasts of inflation are scattered away from the bank of korea s inflation target

the implications of central bank transparency for uncertainty and disagreement abstract using survey data from 25 economies we provide evidence that greater transparency surrounding monetary policy reduces uncertainty of interest rates and inflation primarily by reducing uncertainty that is common to agents rather than disagreement between agents this suggests that studies that focus on disagreement as a proxy for uncertainty understate the benefits of monetary policy transparency the adoption of inflation targets and forward guidance are both associated with lower uncertainty although inflation targets have a stronger impact on reducing uncertainty than forward guidance moreover there are diminishing benefits from ever higher levels of transparency taken as a whole our results support the contention that clarity of communication is as important as the magnitude of transparency

the persistence of power despite the changing meaning of homeownership an age period cohort analysis of urban housing tenure in china 1989 2011 using nine successive waves of the china health and nutrition survey chns data set this study employs hierarchical age period cohort logistic models hapc to analyse temporal patterns of urban homeownership from 1989 to 2011 with the changing meaning of homeownership due to housing reforms the strong period increases in homeownership track policy changes and the most dramatic increase occurs mainly in the era of housing privatisation rather than housing commodification the temporal analyses also offer insights into housing stratification from redistribution to markets the positive effect of education on homeownership is explained by period increases in homeownership whereas working in state sectors has persistently attached to preferred housing tenure choice before and after the housing reforms moreover the significant cohort effect lends support to strengthened temporal inequalities in the reform era these findings not only provide a dynamic understanding of housing stratification in post so

the developmental state government and singapore s economic development since 1960 abstract government interventionism is widely acknowledged to characterize less developed countries but consensus is lacking as to whether it promotes economic development and if so how the present article analyzes the nature of government involvement in the singapore model of economic development and emergence of a developmental state closely associated with this model it compares singapore s experience with south korea s and taiwan s where government also contributed to development success and with other asian countries where government failed to play a strong developmental role

household inequality entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism to empirically investigate its impact we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents home equity and 1880 farmland we identify its effects on entrepreneurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 homestead act or us states removal of death taxes wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit and the proportion of high tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas there is also less redistribution into public goods supportive of entrepreneurship such as schooling and the judiciary income per capita consequently grows more slowly

social value of public information comment morris and shin 2002 is actually pro transparency not con the main result of morris and shin 2002 restated in papers by amato morris and shin 2002 and amato and shin 2003 and commented upon by the economist 2004 has been presented and interpreted as an anti transparency result more public information can be bad however some scrutiny of the result shows that it is actually pro transparency except in very special circumstances more public information is good furthermore for a conservative benchmark of equal precision in public and privateinformation social welfare is higher than in as ituation without public information

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

market culture and authority a comparative analysis of management and organization in the far east three frameworks purport to explain industrial arrangements and practices a market approach that emphasizes economic characteristics a cultural approach that sees organization as the expression of patterned values and an authority approach that explains organization as a historically developed structure of domination the efficacy of each approach is tested in explaining the organizational structures of three rapidly growing east asian economies japan south korea and taiwan the paper argues through comparative analysis that organizational growth is best explained by market and cultural factors but that authority patterns and legitimation strategies best explain organizational structure

scaling up regional development in globalizing china local capital accumulation land centred politics and reproduction of space lin g c s scaling up regional development in globalizing china local capital accumulation land centred politics and reproduction of space regional studies drawing on insights from political economy and third world political ecology this study identifies a new process of regional development in globalizing southern china where municipalities have engaged in a land based and city centred development as a means of original capital accumulation global capitalism and reshuffling of the socialist political economy have given rise to a strategy to scale up the urban region and reproduce space for locally controlled development subsequent gain in growth and competitiveness has been accompanied by increased inequality and social discontents greater attention needs to be devoted to the social and political origins of regional development lin g c s un amenagement du territoire a l echelle en chine au moment de la mondialisation l accumulation du capital local la politique centree sur l occupation d