The introduction of the household responsibility system in the early 1980s and market liberalizing reforms are generally credited with the rapid growth enjoyed by China's rural sector. This growth has not been without some cost however. Over the last two decades, inequality appears to have...

Deborah Davis-Friedmann (1991) described the "retirement" pattern of the Chinese elderly in the prereform era as "ceaseless toil": lacking sufficient means of support, the elderly had to work their entire lives. In this paper we re-cast the metaphor of ceaseless toil in a labor supply model,...