Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Are There Lasting Impacts Of Aid To Poor Areas? Evidence From Rural China, Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Ren Mu

Martin Ravallion

The paper re-visits the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China, 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal husbandry, infrastructure and social services). Data were collected on 2,000 households in project and non-project areas, spanning 10 years. A double-difference estimator of the program’s impact (on top of pre-existing governmental programs) reveals sizeable short-term income gains that were mostly saved. Only small and statistically insignificant gains to mean consumption emerged in the longer-term — though in rough accord with the gain to …

China's (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty, Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen

Martin Ravallion

While the incidence of extreme poverty fell dramatically in China over 1980-2001, progress was uneven over time and across provinces. Rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor, though migration to urban areas helped. Rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth; agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of GDP. Taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor; local government spending helped them in absolute terms; external trade had little short-term impact. Provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against …

On The Logic Of The Economic Integration Of Hong Kong Into The Greater China Economy, Hoi Cheung Cheung

CAPS Working Paper Series

Hong Kong has encountered an economic downturn since the outbreak of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. It was a result of the lack of long-term preparation for adjustment to changes in the industrial structure. Without a foundation to upgrade its industrial structure from labour-intensive manufacturing to mid and high-tech industry, Hong Kong could only transit its industrial structure directly from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector – financial services, trading and logistics, and related services. Nonetheless, due to the keen competition in terms of cost advantages from the neighbouring economies, mainly those regional economies in the Pearl River …

Humanitarian Landmine Action In China And The Role Of The Ngo, Zhai Dequan

The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction

Though China is not a State Party to the Ottawa Convention, the country has long been involved in humanitarian efforts to alleviate the landmine problem. Nationally, China has launched mine clearance campaigns, and has become a State Party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Two organizations have also been established to alleviate the landmine problem. Internationally, China has sponsored several mine-clearance workshops, and has promoted international partnerships to work toward mine clearance.

Procedural Issues In The Anti-Dumping Regulations Of China: A Critical Review Under The Wto Rules, Won-Mog Choi, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established, China his made large-scale efforts to shape its trade remedy system through legal and organizational changes. Through these changes, China could clarify the meanings of WTO anti-dumping provisions including the provision relating to the definition of domestic industry. Moreover, procedural disciplines on reviews were fortified in Chinese anti-dumping system. While the overall improvements to the trade remedy system of China are evident, definitions of several key legal terms, including the concept of related producers, the negligible import standard, and adjustment factors for a fair comparison between normal values and export prices are …

Dai Medicine: Preservation Of And Changes In Ancient Healing Practices, Geoffroy Fauchet

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This independent study project discusses the general concept and theories of Dai medicine and focuses on the conservation of and transformation that both, the traditional and modern Dai medical system have undergone over time.

China-Australia Free Trade Agreement New Icing On An Old Cake-An Opportunity For Fair Trade?, Benedict Sheehy, Jackson N. Maogoto

ExpressO

The on-going challenge in economic development and globalization, particularly for developing countries, is the issue of development and equality in society. The issue becomes particularly problematic when confronted in matters of international trade. Often misnamed anti-globalization activists and pro-globalization activists fail to take note of the underlying assumptions that lead them to conflict—namely, the actual costs and benefits to society that result from their particular positions. In essence, both activists are searching for ways to improve the lives of people in the domestic context and to minimize the damage to their society and environment. China’s impressive economic record is threatened …

Corporations And Social Costs: The Wal-Mart Case Study, Benedict Sheehy

ExpressO

This article examines the role of the corporate vehicle in the creation of social costs. The article identifies some of the political commitments and philosophies behind the differing notions of corporations. Social costs are those activities which result from business activity and cause uncompensated harm to society. The founding contribution to the law and economics discussion by Ronald Coase is given a thorough treatment. The paper next, turns to the dominant explanation of corporate structure, namely the law and economics model developed expounded by Easterbrook and Fischel. It then applies the theoretical discussion in a case study of the world’s …

'A Hundred Flowers Bloom': The Re-Emergence Of The Chinese Press In Post-Suharto Indonesia, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

During the whole 32 years of Suharto’s regime (1966–98), Chinese publications and the use of Chinese language in public were officially banned in Indonesia. As a result, printed matter in Chinese characters that entered Indonesia was classified as ‘prohibited imports’ (Heryanto 1999: 327). This prohibition came to an end after the fall of Suharto, as part of the process of democratization and Reformasi. The post-Suharto era of Reformasi is thus celebrated for the dramatic revival of the freedom of the press and media in Indonesia and many previously banned as well as new publications have emerged since Suharto’s fall. The …

Taiwan's Participation In Inter-Governmental Organizations: An Overview Of Its Initiatives, Chien-Pin Li

Faculty and Research Publications

Emboldened by the ascendance of economic issues on the global agenda and the erosion of security-driven bipolar structures, Taiwan in the late 1980s decided to use its economic advantages for diplomatic gain. Examination of changes in three phases of Taiwan's initiatives indicates that its inter-governmental organization strategies and targets correlate well with domestic politics and external factors.

Slides: Beyond Kyoto: Climate Change And International Law, Fabio Feldmann

Climate Change and the Future of the American West: Exploring the Legal and Policy Dimensions (Summer Conference, June 7-9)

Presenter: Fabio Feldmann, Executive Secretary, São Paulo Forum on Global Climate Changes and Biodiversity, Brazil.

55 slides.

Contains references.

The Political Economy Of Township Government Debt, Township Enterprises, And Rural Financial Institutions In China, Lynette H. Ong

Lynette H Ong, Dr

This paper sheds light on the ways in which township governments had mobilized resources from local financial institutions, and how failure to repay many of these loans had given rise to sizeable local government debt. Mobilization of resources was done through loans to collective enterprises whose de facto owners were township authorities. Though the enterprises were nominal borrowers, loan transactions would not have occurred in the absence of guarantees by township governments. Another way of financial resource mobilization was by establishing local informal financial organizations that were subject to less strict regulations, and over which township authorities could exercise control. …

Multiple Principals And Collective Action: China’S Rural Credit Cooperatives And Poor Households’ Access To Credit, Lynette H. Ong

Lynette H Ong, Dr

Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using the multiple principals–agent framework: the credit cooperatives as agents are accountable to multiple heterogeneous principals—with multiple conflicting objectives. The multiple principals are (1) the County RCC Unions, which exercise control using the evaluation criteria on which the remuneration of grassroots RCC officers is assessed; (2) local party secretaries, who exert influence through top personnel appointment and dismissal …

The Politics Of Indigenization: A Case Study Of Development Of Social Work In China, Miu Chung Yan, Kwok Wah Cheung

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Internationalization and indigenization are dialectical processes of knowledge transfer. However, social work literature has paid scant attention to the process of indigenization, which can best be understood as one of recontextualization. This paper introduces Basil Bernstein's theory, which contends that recontextualization is a political process, as an analytical tool for us to understand the politics of indigenization. To demonstrate the usefulness of this tool, this paper analyzes how, in China, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and social work academics interactively compete for this control.

Valuing Cultural Differences In Behavioral Economics, Justin D. Levinson, Kaiping Peng

ExpressO

Behavioral economic research has tended to ignore the role of cultural differences in economic decision-making. The authors suggest that a systematic bias affects existing behavioral economic theory-- cognitive biases are often assumed to be universal. To examine how cultural background informs economic decision-making, and to test framing effects, morality effects, and out-group effects in a cross-cultural study, the authors conducted an experiment in the United States and China. The experiment was designed to test cultural and cognitive effects on a fundamental economic phenomenon-- how people estimate the financial values of objects over time.

Results of the experiment demonstrated dramatic cultural …

The Floating Population And Crime In Contemporary China, Jonathan Wade Lopez

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Since the late 70's in China there has been a dramatic increase in both the floating population and criminal activity. Members of the floating population, numbering between 79 and 145 million, live apart from their place of official permanent household registration (hukou) and are ineligible for the state-sanctioned social and economic benefits which accompany permanent hukou status. Although the literature and the media suggest that the floating population is to blame for the marked increase in criminal activity, few statistical studies examine the relationship between these two phenomena. This study used data from an extensive population based survey conducted in …

High Tension Without War: Interpreting Taiwan Strait Relations From 1990 To 2005, Yang Cai

Political Science Theses

This study interprets the puzzling absence of war among the US, China, and Taiwan from 1990 to 2005, when identity politics across the Taiwan Strait caused high tensions. The application of realist constructivism theory to this case would produce a prediction of war there resulting from conflicting identities, which produce irreconcilable conflicts of interests over territorial claims. However, the application of four other, relevant international relations theories explains this absence of war during this period. A zero-sum game of competing identities was replaced by a positive-game resulting from three liberal theories promoting inter-state cooperation: complex interdependence; state trading identities; and …

Two Essays On Government Behavior, Li Zhang

Economics Dissertations

The main theme of this dissertation is government’s strategic behaviors. We show that different budget structures give governments incentives to behave differently, and that the Leviathan model and the Bureaucratic model are better in modeling government behaviors than the median voter model. We first discuss theoretically the design of an optimal tax system, promoting the Leviathan government to maximize social welfare in order to maximize its own revenue. Then we examine empirically how government behaviors vary with different budget structures. In essay I, we apply the Buchanan-Brennan (B-B) rule to examine the effects of a tax system on the efficiency …

The Chinese Challenge. Hallucinations For Other Futures, Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

The main question is: What can we learn from China that China is not teaching us? It is proposed that a study of polycontextural logic and morphogrammatics could be helpful to discover this new kind of rationality.

Family Businesses In China (1978-1996): Entry And Performance, Xiaogang Wu

Xiaogang Wu

No abstract provided.

Poverty, Health And Schooling In China, Shengchao Yu, Emily C. Hannum

Emily C. Hannum

No abstract provided.

East Mountain Tiger, West Mountain Tiger: China, The West, And "Colonialism" In Africa, Barry Sautman, Hairong Yan

Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: National Traditions And Foreign Influences In The Architecture And Urban Form Of China And Japan, Carola Hein

Growth and Structure of Cities Faculty Research and Scholarship

Review of JEFFREY E. HANES, The City As Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. pp. xii, 348, bibliography, index; JONATHAN M. REYNOLDS, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. pp. xviii, 318, bibliography, index; JEFFREY W. CODY, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture” 1914-1935. Seattle: University of Washington Press/The Chinese University Press, 2001. pp. xxiv, 264, bibliography, index; GIDEON S. GOLANY, Urban Design Ethics in Ancient China. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. pp. xvi, 312, bibliography, index.

743 ± 17 Ma Granite Clast From Jurassic Conglomerate, Kamiaso, Mino Terrane, Japan: The Case For South China Craton Provenance (Korean Gyeonggi Block?), Allen Phillip Nutman, Y Sano, K Terada, H Hidaka

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

The polymict Kamiaso Conglomerate (Mino Terrane, Japan) contains Jurassic to Palaeoproterozoic clasts—probably derived from Korean basement that lay nearby to the northwest at time of deposition. Clast K2 broke cleanly into two halves during sampling (but the halves were recombined for zircon separation). A third of the K2 zircons are colourless euhedral prisms with oscillatory zoning, with no inheritance and yielded a SHRIMP U/Pb date of 743±17 Ma. Two thirds of K2 zircons are brown oscillatory-zoned corroded prisms with a date of 1860±8 Ma, with inherited cores up to ∼2460 Ma. A likely explanation for this could be that clast …

Comment On "Assessing China's 1994 Fiscal Reforms: An Intermediate Report", Meili Niu, John R. Bartle

Public Administration Faculty Publications

To boost the fiscal revenue, i.e., government revenue over GOP and central government revenue over government total revenue, China conducted the 1994 fiscal reforms. According to some observers, the results of the initial reforms were mixed. This study reveals, contrary to most examinations of previous studies, the 1994 fiscal reforms have been an enormous success in achieving the original policy purposes, although remaining problems still present a daunting task for the Chinese government. This paper examines the factors triggering the 1994 fiscal reforms, reveals the contents and accomplishments of the reforms, explores unfinished tasks and ultimately proposes some policy implications.

An Empirical Examination Of Ipo Underpricing In The Chinese A-Share Market, Ting Yu, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

Research in the literature shows that initial public offerings (IPOs) of common stocks are systematically priced at a discount to their subsequent initial trading price. The large underpricing magnitude in the Chinese IPO market has attracted much attention. We consider three hypotheses that may explain the IPO underpricing in China. These are the winner's curse hypothesis, the ex ante uncertainty hypothesis and the signaling hypothesis. Among these hypotheses, the winner's curse hypothesis has not been tested in the Chinese market. Using IPO data for online fixed-price offerings from November 1995 to December 1998, our results show that the winner's curse …

Chinese Modernization And The Development Of Minority Economies, Stephen Bisogno

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Urban Versus Rural Mortality Among Older Adults In China, Zachary Zimmer, Toshiko Kaneda, Laura Spess

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

For some time, Chinese government policies have treated rural and urban areas very differently, and a by-product of China’s rapid development seems to be an even greater differentiation between urban and rural social and economic life. Over the next several decades, in part because of rapid fertility declines and in part as a result of mortality declines at older ages, China and other developing countries will experience enormous increases in the proportion of older adults and the proportion of the “oldest-old.” It is reasonable to expect that these age structure changes will alter the provision of health care, making an …

The Paradox Of Corruption As Antithesis To Economic Development: Does Corruption Undermine Economic Development In Indonesia And China, And Why Are The Experiences Different In Each Country?, Andrew White

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The question of whether corruption is antithetical to economic development has been extensively researched and debated since the 1960s. While nearly all participants in the debate appear to agree that corruption ultimately is antithetical to long-term economic development, the extent to which it positively or negatively affects economic development in the short term depends upon highly contextual factors. In different countries and regions of the world, factors of local culture and history, the nature of the state, the type of corruption and actors involved, and the political responses and motivations to curtail corruption all inform the answer to this question. …

Westernization Of Business Organizations In Japan And China. Continuity And Change, Wai Keung Chung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.