Concerned about national grain self-sufficiency and rural household incomes, in 2004 China announced that it was planning to reverse its longstanding policy of taxing farm households and instead began to provide them with subsidies. Over the past five years, annual announcements have trumpeted...

A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this paper we exploit a unique survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly selected...

This paper studies insider privatization in transition economies. We show theoretically that the underperformance of insider-privatized firms could be due to the manager-cum-owner's lack of incentives after privatization. A screening theory predicts that a firm's postprivatization incentives...

In recent years there has been much discussion of the difference between Inequality and Polarization. The vast literature on inequality is held to miss out key features of distribution change, which are better described as changes in the polarization. Axioms have been proposed which capture some...

This paper constructs and analyses a long run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late...

In this paper I give an account of development debates of the past two decades, focusing on the Washington Consensus and on the broader economic development discourse in historical context. Section 2 gives a basic account of the Washington consensus and how its meaning changed from the original...

This paper develops a political economy framework that determines the factors causing underinvestment in public research expenditures. Governments are unable to fully compensate for unequal income distribution effects of research because of either their inability to make credible commitments or...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...