The purpose of economic reform is to reduce distortions and enhance efficiency. However, when reforms are partial and incremental, individuals and local governments are often able to capture the rent inherent in the gradual transition process. Young (2000) warned that such rent-seeking behavior...

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...

"We use two rounds of surveys, taken in 2000 and 2008 in the Zhili Township children's garment cluster in Zhejiang Province, to examine in depth the evolution of this industrial cluster. Firm size has grown on average in terms of output and employment, and increasing divergence in firm sizes has...

This paper develops a framework to measure the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty. Increased investments in agricultural R&D can lower food prices by increasing food production, and lower food prices benefit the urban poor because they often spend more than 60% of their income on...

This study develops an analytical framework to account for sources of rapid economic growth in China. The traditional Solow approach includes only two sources, i.e. increased use of inputs and technical change. We expanded the approach to include a third source of economic growth-structural...

In developing countries, identifying the most effective community-level governance structure is a key issue and, increasingly, empirical evaluation of the effects of democratization on the provision of local public goods is needed. Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of villages in rural...

Because land is scarce, farmers in China increasingly have to rely on nonfarm activities to enhance their incomes. The functioning of rural nonfarm labor markets is therefore crucial in determining who has access to nonfarm employment. Previous studies have identified human capital as a key...

Rapid industrial development and urbanization transfer more and more land away from agricultural production, threatening China's capability to feed itself. This paper analyzes the determinants of land use by modeling arable land and sown area separately. An inverse U-shaped relationship between...

A Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop-specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture. Despite a modest behavior assumption about equal marginal returns of non-land inputs among crops, this method does not require price information, which is...

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty. In this study we use a simultaneous equations model and...