Working Paper
South-South labour migration and the impact of the informal China-Ghana gold rush 2008–13
This paper examines irregular South-South migration from China to Ghana, and the role it has played in transforming livelihoods and broader developmental landscapes. It looks at the entry from the mid-2000s of approximately 50,000 Chinese migrants...
Working Paper
Records of medical malpractice litigation
Objective: To assess the characteristics and incidence of medical litigation in China and the potential usefulness of the records of such litigation as an indicator of healthcare quality. Methods: We investigated 13,620 cases of medical malpractice...
Working Paper
Smoothing or strengthening the ‘Great Gatsby curve’?
We examine the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme on intergenerational wealth dependence using a nationally representative longitudinal household survey covering the period 2011–13. We adopt an instrumental quantile...
Working Paper
Inequality in China
In this paper we describe the major trends in China’s income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market...
Working Paper
Transforming informal work and livelihoods in China
The informal sector has long been viewed as a locus of the disadvantaged, unskilled, and inexperienced workers in under-developed and developing economies. Workers in the informal sector, however, can learn skills and gain experience that could help...
Book
Economic Transformation and Income Distribution in China over Three Decades
It is arguable that the most important event in the world economy in recent decades has been the rise of China, from being on a par with sub-Sahara Africa at the start of economic reform to being an economic superpower today. That rise remains under...
Working Paper
Structural transformation, inequality, and inclusive growth in China
In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China’s structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China’s economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic...
Working Paper
The changing nature of work and earnings inequality in China
This paper examines the evolution of China’s industrial and occupational structure in the last two decades and its impact on wage inequality. We find that non-routine cognitive and interpersonal tasks have increased, while routine cognitive tasks...
Working Paper
Taxless fiscal states
How do modern fiscal states arise? Perhaps the most dominant explanation, based on the European experience, is that democratic institutions that limited the extractive power of states—exemplified by the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England—paved the...
Working Paper
Elementary education in India versus China
This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China’s shift in focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, and evidence-based guidelines for effective implementation of India’s New...
Working Paper
Size matters: measuring the effects of inequality and growth shocks
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
Working Paper
Investigating the fiscal resource curse
The term fiscal resource curse refers to countries’ inability to raise taxes from a broad base in the presence of natural resources. We employ a novel instrumental variable strategy to estimate the causal effect of resource revenues on non-resource...