Incremental Reform and Distortions in China's Product and Factor Markets Xiaobo Zhang and Kong-Yam Tan The purpose of economic reform is to reduce distortions and enhance efficiency. This could happen, for example, if increased interregional competition as a result of fiscal decentralization led...

China has quickly become the largest e-commerce market in the world. By matching a nationally representative China Family Panel Studies survey with county-level e-commerce information obtained from Alibaba, this paper examines how e-commerce development has shaped household consumption growth in...

Incremental Reform and Distortions in China's Product and Factor Markets Xiaobo Zhang and Kong-Yam Tan The purpose of economic reform is to reduce distortions and enhance efficiency. This could happen, for example, if increased interregional competition as a result of fiscal decentralization led...

Using data from 144 village-level governments in India's Tamil Nadu state, we investigate political reservations for women and whether the gender of village government leaders influences the provision of village public goods. A knowledge test of village government presidents and a survey about...

This paper examines the evolving patterns of bilateral city-to-city manufacturing investment flows from 2000 to 2015 in China, which are aggregated from detailed firm-level investment transactions based on the administrative business registration database. The coastal regions were a more...

Non-compliance with regulations by enterprises is said to be rife in developing countries. Yet there is limited systematic evidence of the magnitude of non-compliance at the enterprise level. Making innovative use of two complementary data sources, non-compliance for India's Factories Act has...

The commission on growth and development was established in April 2006 in response to two insights: people do not talk about growth enough, and when they do, they speak with unearned conviction. The workshops turned out to be intense, lively affairs, lasting up to three days. It became clear...

Noncompliance with regulations by enterprises is said to be rife in developing countries. Yet there is limited systematic evidence of the magnitude of noncompliance at the enterprise level. Making innovative use of two complementary data sources, this paper quantifies noncompliance for India's...

Two of the great stylized predictions of development theory, and two of the great expectations of policy makers as indicators of progress in development, are inexorable urbanization and inexorable formalization. Urbanization is indeed happening, beyond the "tipping point" where half the world's...

Social protection is absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing importance of risk and...