Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Conducting Ethnography In China, Leung-Sea, Lucia Siu

Prof. SIU Leung-sea, Lucia

Conducting ethnography in modern China can be highly fruitful, yet there are special-care items that seldom appear in methodology literature. Drawn from the author’s fieldwork in China’s futures markets in 2005, the first part of this paper discusses a list of practical items that ethnographers are likely to face: field access, the organizational culture of public and quasi-public institutions, obtaining trust, the scenarios of gifts and banquets, reliability of statistical data, politically sensitive areas, and personal safety.

The second part is a reflection on standpoint issues, namely Orientalism and nationalism. Ethnographers usually face tensions that arise from their roles, as …

China: Re-Emerging, Not Rising, Dylan Kissane

Dylan Kissane

In late 1993 Nicholas Kristof argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs that “the rise of china, if it continues, may be the most important trend in the world for the next century”. Fifteen years later two things are clear: there is no longer any reason to wonder if China’s rise will continue and the impact of this surge in the East is now clearly the most important trend in international politics this century.

Forecasting The Storm: Power Cycle Theory And Conflict In The Major Power System, Dylan Kissane

Dylan Kissane

Unpredicted and unpredictable storms have cut a disastrous swathe through coastal communities in recent years. If the international relations system can be imagined as a peaceful coast, then conflict is the storm that wrecks havoc upon those in its path. One goal, then, of those within the discipline who study conflict is to forecast these international storms and, in power cycle theory, there exists a method which is of some utility to this end. This paper re-introduces power cycle theory, explaining its components and methodology before introducing the specific changes to the method that are the result of the author’s …

Decentralizing Eligibility For A Federal Antipoverty Program, Martin Ravallion

Martin Ravallion

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program’s performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local income effect on the eligibility cut-offs. China’s Di Bao program provides a case study. Poorer municipalities are found to adopt systematically lower thresholds—roughly negating inter-city differences in need for the program and generating considerable horizontal inequity, whereby poor families in rich cities fare better. The income effect is not strong enough to undermine the program’s overall poverty impact; …

How Relevant Is Targeting To The Success Of An Antipoverty Program?, Martin Ravallion

Martin Ravallion

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that “better targeting” implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce, and the lessons from the literature have often been ignored by practitioners. The paper shows that standard measures of targeting performance are uninformative, or even deceptive, about the impacts on poverty, and cost-effectiveness in reducing poverty, of a large cash transfer program in China. The results suggest that in program design and evaluation, it would be better to focus directly on the program’s outcomes for …