In urban China, urban resident annual earnings are 1.3 times larger than long term rural migrant earnings as observed in a nationally representative sample in 2002. Using microsimulation, we decompose this difference into four sources, with particular attention to path dependence and statistical...

Using new household survey data for 1995 and 2002, we investigate the size of China's urban-rural income gap, the gap's contribution to overall inequality in China, and the factors underlying the gap. Our analysis improves on past estimates by using a fuller measure of income, adjusting for...

This paper documents the procedures in constructing China's employment and compensation metrics and measuring labor input in the Chinese economy. We begin with discussions of major conceptual, coverage, and classification problems in the official labor statistics and then propose strategies to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate rural people's perception of income adequacy in order to understand how it is affected by income in the county where the respondent lives, age of household members, as well as number of household members. The paper also aims to find out how...

Following the user cost theory on measuring labor input, after a careful scrutiny of available information, we construct employment and compensation matrices for China's industrial workforce over the period 1949-2009. Our measures are able to capture both individual and interactive effects of...

This fascinating study compares and contrasts the immense internal migration movements in China and Indonesia. Over the next two decades, approximately two-thirds of the rural labour force is expected to migrate, transforming their respective societies from primarily rural to urban based.

We estimate productivity growth for 33 industries covering the entire Chinese economy using a time series of input-output tables covering 1982-2000. Capital input is measured using detailed investment data by asset and labor input uses demographic information from household surveys. We find a...

Subjective Poverty Line methodology is applied to rural China 2002 using a sample from 22 provinces. Respondents were asked two questions: one on amount of food necessary and another on amount of cash necessary for their households. The respondent’s perception of how much cash is needed varies...