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This paper explores the impacts of home appliances going to the countryside ( HAGC) in a spatial general equilibrium model. Main findings include the following: ( i) if the manufactured goods are highly differentiated, HAGC reduces the urban-rural real income gap and improves the social welfare; ( ii) if there exists rural-urban migration, the change in the social welfare due to HAGC will experience a U-shaped curve as transportation cost decreases; and ( iii) when the manufactured goods are highly differentiated, or fairly standardized under either very high or low transportation cost, price subsidy should be expanded to all manufactured goods. Otherwise, the optimal policy is laissez-faire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents important changes in the Chinese macroeconomic environment over the last three decades. The volatility of Chinese aggregate economic activities has fallen dramatically by nearly 60 per cent during its reform period, a phenomenon that coincides with the ' Great Moderation' that occurred in most industrialized economies. We employ a provincial panel-data method to investigate the driving forces of the increasing macroeconomic stability in China. We examine the empirical relationship between output volatility and various economic, policy, institutional, and demographic factors. Our results suggest that the acceleration of reform toward the market economy, which began around 1994, generally leads to a widespread output volatility reduction across Chinese provinces. Both state-owned enterprise reform and human capital accumulation are important determinants of output volatility since the mid-1990s; they play an important role in explaining the provincial differences on volatility reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the role of local climate conditions in spurring interregional migration in China over the period 2000 to 2010. We developed a robust empirical approach based on a correlated random effects model and a prefecture‐level panel dataset which allows us to account for both within province migration flows and prefecture‐specific characteristics. Empirical results reveal that climate conditions are important determinants of migration in China. Specifically, prefectures with warmer winter, cooler summer, and more available sunshine are more attractive to migrants. Economic factors such as income level and employment opportunities are also important drivers of population growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note presents a simple urban model of the Chinese two-tier plan/market economy, and investigates the equilibrium and optimum by comparison with a standard urban model of the market economy. We show that the Chinese urban economy has a possibility of being out of equilibrium and becoming unstable when the amount of land assigned by the government to firms is too much relative to the labor assigned to them. Furthermore, the model indicates that, while the Chinese urban economy would have a greater total differential land rent than the market economy, the Chinese urban residents would be worse off in terms of their earned wage income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]