Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of U.S. history. They may have risen at times in Britain before 1875. The first half of this century equalized pre-fisc incomes more in Britain than in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries, reversing...

China is a success story of inclusive trade growth as a result of its participation in Global Value Chains (GVCs). It is in transition from a processing and assembly hub towards an innovation centre, and is becoming a regional supplier of research and development (R&D) intensive parts and...

China's early industrialization created distortions.This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective.

By applying panel estimation models to Chinese provincial level data for 1993-2008, this paper examine the impacts of China's coastal foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports on its inland regions. The results show that coastal FDI has overall positive interregional impacts, while coastal...

The desirability of WTO membership for China depends on whether its economic successes have been the result of its discovery of new institutional forms (e.g. dual track pricing, SOE contracts, and fiscal contracts) that are optimal for China''s particular economic circumstances, or have been the...

The 6th Plenum of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) concluded on October 11, 2006, with the commitment to establish a harmonious society by 2020. The obvious implication from this commitment is that the present major social, economic and political trends are not...

This paper reviews empirical methods used to estimate the impact of trade policies under imperfect competition. We decompose the welfare effects of trade policy into four possible channels: (i) a deadweight loss from distorting consumption and production decisions; (ii) a possible gain from...

The recent literature on quid pro quo foreign direct investment (FDI) suggests that FDI may be induced by the threat of protection, and further, that FDI may be used as an instrument to defuse a protectionist threat. This paper uses a panel data set of 4-digit SIC level observations of Japanese...

We develop a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using dis-aggregated American imports data. We find strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the ""produce cycle"" hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States...