查看更多>>摘要：This study contributes to the literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) in China by covering a longer and more recent span of time, employing better measures of given characteristics, and analyzing IOp for household income per capita with comparisons to individual income. Furthermore, it analyzes how IOp differs between the rural- and urban-born, and how IOp changes across birth cohorts and with age. We use 2002, 2013 and 2018 data from the Chinese Household Income Study and focus on income inequality among working-age persons. We find that IOp in China declined, especially between 2013 and 2018. In 2002 the large contributors to IOp were region, hukou type at birth, and parents' characteristics. In 2018 the contributions of region, hukou type at birth and parents' occupation had decreased, but that of parents' education had increased. We find that IOp is larger among those born in rural than urban China. Furthermore, IOP's contribution to total inequality within each birth cohort is highest earlier in individuals' work lives and declines with age. IOp is higher for older than younger birth cohorts, reflecting that younger cohorts have benefited from increased opportunities associated with China's reforms and opening up.
查看更多>>摘要：We analyze the trade and price effects of China's retaliatory tariffs on imports from the United States in the period from January 2017 to May 2019. We apply the difference-in-differences approach to the up-to-date China Customs data on imports disaggregated by eight-digit HS product category and source country. We find large reductions in the value and quantity of imports from the US and an almost complete tariff pass-through onto import prices. These results remain robust to extensive changes in the specification and in data sample and to a variety of placebo tests using processing imports or exempted products that were originally included in the tariff lists but removed before implementation. We also find that the trade and price effects are heterogeneous across products, differing either in the end-use or in the ownership types of the importing firm. Similar to recent findings in the US (Amiti et al., 2019, 2020), our estimates suggest limited terms-of-trade gain due to China's tariff hikes.
查看更多>>摘要：The loss of targeting efficiency due to information asymmetry is a longstanding problem in aid programs. China's Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program addresses this problem by assigning local government officials to individual impoverished households. These officials, referred to as poverty alleviation coordinators (PACs), are required to pay frequent home visits to the assigned households and to deploy policy resources for poverty reduction. The program is costly in terms of human resources because the officials also have regular duties in a variety of departments. We investigate the effects of the PAC system on poverty alleviation and explore the mechanisms of the effects. Based on the Chinese Poor Population Tracking Dataset and econometric analysis, we find that the households with a larger income increase are those whose PACs work in a department that has the type of resources needed by the household. This indicates that a good match between the resource and the need could enhance the effect of the TPA program. In addition, PACs at a higher position in the governance structure show a larger income increase in their assigned households, which is expected, because a higher position could have more resources to deploy. These findings shed light on role of institutional arrangements in alleviating information asymmetry in poverty reduction programs.
查看更多>>摘要：Individual or household income has been the conventional yardstick of poverty. Presently, nonincome factors are universally accepted as measures of poverty. Attention on the multiple dimensions of poverty and their policy implications has been growing in the past 20 years. However, few studies have analyzed relative multidimensional poverty, especially in China. Moreover, the relationship between relative welfare poverty and happiness has been rarely studied, particularly given that the decline of poverty seemed not bringing a significant increase in happiness in China. This research gap is noteworthy because enhancing the subjective well-being of the people is crucial to a nation's sustainable economic development. On the basis of the microlevel data from China General Social Survey, this study puts forward a welfare approach to analyzing the relative multidimensional poverty and then determines the link between relative welfare poverty and individual happiness. Our results show that 1) relative welfare poverty has not declined significantly and 2) there is a significantly happiness-reducing effect of relative welfare poverty.
查看更多>>摘要：Conventional wisdom suggests that, if a large nation reduces tariffs, the Rest of the World (RoW) as a whole should immediately experience gains from trade. However, little simulation evidence has been provided to evaluate the welfare effects of China's tariff reduction upon its WTO accession on each of its trade partners. This paper addresses the above issue under both the perfectly competitive model and the monopolistic competition framework a` la Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Melitz (2003). Armed by the method of Dekle, Eaton, and Kortum (2007, 2008) to quantify the individual countries' responses to the "China (trade liberalization) shock" at equilibrium, we could check the extent to which global welfare benefit from the import tariff reduction after China's entry into the WTO. The quantitative results show that, both China and the RoW benefit from Chinese participation into the WTO, with estimated welfare gains falling in a range of [1.4697%, 3.8743%] and [0.0743%, 0.1015%], respectively. That is to say, about 58.24% of total benefits extracted from China's accession into the WTO worldwide flow to countries other than China under perfect competition; while under monopolistic competition, the whole world enjoys a 0.1571% welfare increases if firms' entry is restricted, of which 42.64% are injected into the RoW, an equivalent amount of 23.3903 billion US dollars. Since allowing for firms' entry and exit would lead to adjustments in both aggregate price indices and government tariff revenues, welfare gains of the world significantly increase (0.2474%), but these adjustments would slightly distort the welfare changes for other countries in the sense that only 36.50%, which is equivalent to 32.1008 billion US dollars, overflow to the RoW. As a result, some countries gain more, while some less.
查看更多>>摘要：Does import competition explain the gender gap in labor force participation? The distributional consequences of trade liberalization have fascinated decades of economists and policy makers. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that import competition enlarges the gender gap in labor force participation in China during 1990 and 2005. The results are robust to various identification challenges, including contemporaneous confounders, treatment effect heterogeneity, and spatial correlations in standard errors. The magnitude of the gender-differential effects of import competition on labor force participation grows by age, and peaks for people aged 46-50. The household division of labor appears to explain the gender-differential effects. Import competition also leads to a relative contraction of female-intensive industries, and reduces the share of female employees in each industry.
查看更多>>摘要：Food safety problems are drawing increasing attention after the occurrence of repeated food scandals in China. The literature has found that social trust, a non-institutional factor, is an important factor in disciplining dishonest behaviour and improves the media's incentives to report. In this paper, we develop a model to investigate the dual effects of social trust-behaviour discipline effect and media enhancing effect-and analyse its interplay with institutional factors on food scandal exposure. The theory is then tested using 2004-2011 food event data. The results show that trust has a significant positive impact on food scandal exposure, which implies that the media enhancing effect plays a dominant role in China. However, this effect is weakened in provinces with a higher level of law enforcement and market development, which suggests that institutional factors are a substitute for social trust in affecting food scandal exposure in China.
NSTL
Elsevier