When examining questions regarding the Lewis model, one of the most salient set of facts involves the shift of labor between agricultural and the off farm sectors. The goal of this paper is to answer several questions about the nature of this movement: How has the expansion of the economy after...

Purpose – This paper aims to explain why the quality of infrastructure projects in rural China differs from village to village and how project quality is correlated with project design attributes and governance factors. Design/methodology/approach – Using primary data collected by the...

This study seeks to explain the differences in infrastructure quality across China’s villages. Using primary data on three main types of infrastructure projects in rural China, we find that a.) between-project within-village quality differences are small and project design has little...

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...

A substantial proportion of China's rapid economic growth is attributed to its large number of rural to urban migrants, but most of these migrants' children are left behind in rural areas, mainly due to China's household registration system. Any attempt to identify the impact of parental...

China’s rural reforms expose farm households to the risk of administrative land reallocation and adjustment. The possibility of land reallocation gives rise to the problem of tenure insecurity which reduces farm households' incentives to invest in the land and to use the labor forces...

China’s economic reforms make the farmers face the risk of land reallocation and adjustment, raising the questions about the impact of land reallocation on farm productivity and efficiency. Deep understanding what determines land reallocation, whether and to what extent farm productivity and...