Despite large potential economic gains to the countries concerned, bilateral and multilateral negotiations regarding liberalization of migration have not had the high profile of trade negotiations and agreements. Migration and trade have been traditionally the prerogative of different...

Agriculture remains a major sector of the New Zealand economy, with the vast majority of farm and food production exported. The accelerating intensification of farming in New Zealand over recent decades raises concern over the current sustainability of New Zealand farming, and whether it can...

The goal of the World Bank is 'a world free of poverty' but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The 'head-count index' simply counts the poor, while the 'poverty gap index' shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure...

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this...

In this note, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are applied to data from the 2005 International Social Survey Program Work Orientations (ISSP-WO) survey to examine the public sector pay premium in New Zealand. Taking account of a wide range of worker characteristics and attitudes, job...

Many are interested in China’s energy situation, however, numerous energy related issues in China still remain unanswered, for example, what are the potential forces driving energy demand and supply? Previous reviews focused only on fossil fuel based energy and ignored other important elements...

The nature and location of urbanization economies and their effects on productivity per worker in China are examined. Unlike previous studies, more accurate resident-based measures of urban scale from the 2010 census are used. The size of urbanization economies is similar to those in other...

The large literature on regional inequality in China is hampered by incomplete evidence on price dispersion across space, making it hard to distinguish real and nominal inequality. The two main methods used to calculate spatial deflators have been to price a national basket of goods and services...

Asian governments intervene in the world rice market to protect domestic consumers. Whether consumers are nutritionally vulnerable depends on the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices. Common demand models applied to household survey and market price data ignore quality substitution...

If relative prices of goods within a commodity group are constant, Hicksian separability lets the price of a single good represent the group price level. This is relied on by price questionnaires used in household surveys. Methods of estimating demand systems from household survey data also rely...