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on China |
| By: | Roberts, Mark; Deichmann, Uwe; Fingleton, Bernard; Shi, Tuo |
| Abstract: | Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones. This paper evaluates the aggregate and spatial economic impacts of China's newly constructed National Expressway Network, focussing, in particular, on its short-run impacts. To achieve this aim, the authors adopt a counterfactual approach based on the estimation and simulation of a structural"new economic geography"model. Overall, they find that aggregate Chinese real income was approximately 6 percent higher than it would have been in 2007 had the expressway network not been built. Although there is considerable heterogeneity in the results, the authors do not find evidence of a significant reduction in disparities across prefectural level regions or of a reduction in urban-rural disparities. If anything, the expressway network appears to have reinforced existing patterns of spatial inequality, although, over time, these will likely be reduced by enhanced migration. |
| Keywords: | Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Roads&Highways,Regional Economic Development |
| Date: | 2010–11–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5479&r=cna |
| By: | Benjamin, Dwayne; Brandt, Loren; Giles, John |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates the relationship between initial village inequality and subsequent household income growth for a large sample of households in rural China. Using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years 1987-2002, and controlling for an array of household and village characteristics, the paper finds that households located in higher inequality villages experienced significantly lower income growth through the 1990s. However, local inequality’s predictive power and effects are significantly diminished by the end of the sample. The paper exploits several advantages of the household-level data to explore hypotheses that shed light on the channels by which inequality affects growth. Biases due to aggregation and heterogeneity of returns to own-resources, previously suggested as candidate explanations for the relationship, are both ruled out. Instead, the evidence points to unobserved village institutions at the time of economic reforms that were associated with household access to higher income activities as the source of the link between inequality and growth. The empirical analysis addresses a number of pertinent econometric issues including measurement error and attrition, but underscores others that are likely to be intractable for all investigations of the inequality-growth relationship. |
| Keywords: | Access to Finance,Inequality,Rural Poverty Reduction,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Services&Transfers to Poor |
| Date: | 2010–11–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5483&r=cna |