title: Counting Errors: How Misunderstanding of China's Local Population and Employment Counts Affects Economic Analysis

authors: Li, Chao

subjects: China

abstract: A confusion over local population counts and employment counts in China persists throughout the economic literature. The existing studies within many branches of economics related to China commonly use the count of people with local hukou registration, the GDP per capita using the hukou count as the population denominator, and incomplete employment counts reported in various Chinese statistical yearbooks as if they were appropriate measures of local population, local employment and local per capita income. This misunderstanding of China’s local population and employment counts may lead researchers astray and could contribute to wrong conclusions and mistaken policy implications. An analogous error would be to study the economic geography of, say, the United States using local population and employment counts that were only for citizens rather than for all residents; the resulting statistical pictures are likely to be biased since cities such as New York or Los Angeles have a much higher share of non-citizens than do other areas. Yet there is no similar criticism of the large and growing literature that relies on sub-national population counts for China, despite the equally egregious errors that are likely to have resulted from using the wrong population and employment counts.
	Five economic issues that are pertinent to modern China are studied in this thesis using the most reliable estimates of local resident population and employment from China’s 2010 population census. These issues are regional inequality, optimal city size, the city size distribution, the nature, location and size of urbanization economies, and the determinants of urban land area expansion. Each issue is studied in a single, self-contained, paper that in some cases has already appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, and in other cases is under review at such journals. In general, the findings based on the most reliable local resident population counts and employment counts from the 2010 census extensively challenge the existing evidence in the literature. In some cases the policy implications from this new research are the opposite of what was previously suggested from research that was potentially distorted by the counting errors described here.

text: Counting Errors: How Misunderstanding of China's Local Population and Employment Counts Affects Economic Analysis A confusion over local population counts and employment counts in China persists throughout the economic literature. The existing studies within many branches of economics related to China commonly use the count of people with local hukou registration, the GDP per capita using the hukou count as the population denominator, and incomplete employment counts reported in various Chinese statistical yearbooks as if they were appropriate measures of local population, local employment and local per capita income. This misunderstanding of China’s local population and employment counts may lead researchers astray and could contribute to wrong conclusions and mistaken policy implications. An analogous error would be to study the economic geography of, say, the United States using local population and employment counts that were only for citizens rather than for all residents; the resulting statistical pictures are likely to be biased since cities such as New York or Los Angeles have a much higher share of non-citizens than do other areas. Yet there is no similar criticism of the large and growing literature that relies on sub-national population counts for China, despite the equally egregious errors that are likely to have resulted from using the wrong population and employment counts.
	Five economic issues that are pertinent to modern China are studied in this thesis using the most reliable estimates of local resident population and employment from China’s 2010 population census. These issues are regional inequality, optimal city size, the city size distribution, the nature, location and size of urbanization economies, and the determinants of urban land area expansion. Each issue is studied in a single, self-contained, paper that in some cases has already appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, and in other cases is under review at such journals. In general, the findings based on the most reliable local resident population counts and employment counts from the 2010 census extensively challenge the existing evidence in the literature. In some cases the policy implications from this new research are the opposite of what was previously suggested from research that was potentially distorted by the counting errors described here.

year: 2015

title: Unsupervised concept drift detection using a student–teacher approach

authors: Cerqueira, Vitor

abstract: Concept drift detection is a crucial task in data stream evolving environments. Most of state of the art approaches designed to tackle this problem monitor the loss of predictive models. However, this approach falls short in many real-world scenarios, where the true labels are not readily available to compute the loss. In this context, there is increasing attention to approaches that perform concept drift detection in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without access to the true labels after the model is deployed. We propose a novel approach to unsupervised concept drift detection based on a student-teacher learning paradigm. Essentially, we create an auxiliary model (student) to mimic the primary model’s behaviour (teacher). At run-time, our approach is to use the teacher for predicting new instances and monitoring the mimicking loss of the student for concept drift detection. In a set of experiments using 19 data streams, we show that the proposed approach can detect concept drift and present a competitive behaviour relative to the state of the art approaches.

text: Unsupervised concept drift detection using a student–teacher approach Concept drift detection is a crucial task in data stream evolving environments. Most of state of the art approaches designed to tackle this problem monitor the loss of predictive models. However, this approach falls short in many real-world scenarios, where the true labels are not readily available to compute the loss. In this context, there is increasing attention to approaches that perform concept drift detection in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without access to the true labels after the model is deployed. We propose a novel approach to unsupervised concept drift detection based on a student-teacher learning paradigm. Essentially, we create an auxiliary model (student) to mimic the primary model’s behaviour (teacher). At run-time, our approach is to use the teacher for predicting new instances and monitoring the mimicking loss of the student for concept drift detection. In a set of experiments using 19 data streams, we show that the proposed approach can detect concept drift and present a competitive behaviour relative to the state of the art approaches.

year: 2022-01-01

title: Race-ing and engendering the nation-state in Aotearoa/New Zealand

authors: Seuffert, Nan

subjects: Maori

abstract: During the past several decades the dynamics of law and policy reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand have prefigured and encapsulated contemporary trends in economic state restructuring, indigenous claims to refigure the nation, and gender struggles for political representation. Successive governments have restructured the economy and the state using radical forms of neo-liberal economic policy with the stated aim of globalizing the economy. Political action on the part of the indigenous Maori people, often led by Maori women, increased and diversified, and included demands for self-determination and redress of historical colonial injustices. In 1997, the conservative National Party’s Jenny Shipley become the country’s first white female Prime Minister, followed in 1999 by the election of a center-left coalition headed by Labour Party leader Helen Clark. This article analyzes the race and gender dynamics of these contemporary trends. First, it argues that policies of state structural adjustment and Maori political claims have converged in commodified settlements of past colonial injustices as corporate deals. These deals are temporary alliances of men across race to silence and erase the demands for self-determination or political power sharing of Maori activists, who are usually Maori women. Second, this article contends that the political instability created by rapid structural adjustment and the change to a Mixed Member Proportional (“MMP”) electoral system converges with white backlash against these settlements to open space for New Zealand’s first two female Prime Ministers. This article also suggests that the election of a second white female Prime Minister in New Zealand may reflect the (temporary) regendering of the role of Prime Minister to the feminine.

text: Race-ing and engendering the nation-state in Aotearoa/New Zealand During the past several decades the dynamics of law and policy reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand have prefigured and encapsulated contemporary trends in economic state restructuring, indigenous claims to refigure the nation, and gender struggles for political representation. Successive governments have restructured the economy and the state using radical forms of neo-liberal economic policy with the stated aim of globalizing the economy. Political action on the part of the indigenous Maori people, often led by Maori women, increased and diversified, and included demands for self-determination and redress of historical colonial injustices. In 1997, the conservative National Party’s Jenny Shipley become the country’s first white female Prime Minister, followed in 1999 by the election of a center-left coalition headed by Labour Party leader Helen Clark. This article analyzes the race and gender dynamics of these contemporary trends. First, it argues that policies of state structural adjustment and Maori political claims have converged in commodified settlements of past colonial injustices as corporate deals. These deals are temporary alliances of men across race to silence and erase the demands for self-determination or political power sharing of Maori activists, who are usually Maori women. Second, this article contends that the political instability created by rapid structural adjustment and the change to a Mixed Member Proportional (“MMP”) electoral system converges with white backlash against these settlements to open space for New Zealand’s first two female Prime Ministers. This article also suggests that the election of a second white female Prime Minister in New Zealand may reflect the (temporary) regendering of the role of Prime Minister to the feminine.

year: 2002-02-01