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Based on a mathematical model and empirical test, this paper explores the incentive of income for aspirations and its channels, forging links between theory and data. Results present evidence that income significantly inspires one's aspirations, and all conclusions still hold after overcoming the interference of potential endogenous issues. In terms of channels, the "aspirations window" (a set of similar perceivable individuals) and "bandwidth load" (the mental space to think, process problems, and come up with solutions) play the mediating role in the stimulation of money; that is, low incomes will make aspirations window narrower and bandwidth load heavier, which is a momentous force behind one's aspirations failure. This paper also enlightens income distribution and the construction of internal motivation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After accounting for top incomes missing from the Chinese Household Income Project, this paper examines the income inequality trend in China during the 21st century. Our analysis, which involves fitting the upper tail of the income distribution to a power‐law model, reveals that the authoritative income survey data miss 0.68% of the population and 6.19% of aggregate income in 2018. Despite the most recent survey data providing better coverage of top incomes, our correction is still crucial. The raw survey data indicate a consistently increasing Gini coefficient between 2002 and 2018, but the corrected index starts to decline from 2013. Meanwhile, the revised top 1% income share increases from 7.01% in 2002 to 7.89% in 2013 and then slightly decreases to 7.64% in 2018, while the revised top 10% income share stabilises at around 33% throughout the period. Notably, China's revised top 10% and top 50% income shares in 2018 are close to those of the United Kingdom but are considerably lower than those of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing evidence shows that farm households in developing countries maintain a portfolio of income‐generating activities. Concerns have been raised that household income diversification to include nonfarm activities will stifle farm works, and thus reduce agricultural productivity. On the contrary, some evidence of complementarity between the farm and nonfarm activities in rural areas has been found. This paper uses data from the fourth and the fifth waves of Tanzania's National Panel Surveys to examine whether there exists complementarity or substitutability between farm and nonfarm activities in rural Tanzania. The findings show that participation in off‐farm work and nonfarm business activities has no clear relationship to the adoption and use of improved agricultural practices, namely, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Participation in off‐farm work and nonfarm business activities does not also seem to directly influence agricultural investments, production, and productivity nor overall household income. These results suggest that the complementary and substitution effects of nonfarm activities offset each other in Tanzania, implying that proper policies are required to unleash the potential impact of nonfarm activities on agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth framework it is shown that for an optimum a benevolent social planner cannot have an excessive "love of wealth". With a "right" "love of wealth" an optimum exists and implies higher long-run per-capita capital, income, and consumption relative to the standard model. This has important implications for comparative development trajectories. The optimum implies dynamic efficiency with the possibility of getting arbitrarily close to the golden rule where long-run per-capita consumption is maximal. It is shown that the optimal path attains its steady state more slowly. Thus, the beneficial effects of love of wealth materialize later than in the standard model. Furthermore, the economy can be decentralized as a competitive private ownership economy. One can then identify "love of wealth" with the "spirit of capitalism." The paper thus implies that one needs a "right" level of the "spirit of capitalism" to realize any beneficial effects for the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical method to account for historical episodes of growth disparity. A numerical computation shows that the properties of the local dynamics of the proposed model are consistent with the facts indicated by selected episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the effect of parental education on children's education by using instruments generated by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and further explores the mechanisms of this causal relationship. Several important findings stand out from our empirical analyses. We find a larger intergenerational persistence in education for higher level in urban areas but for a lower level of education in rural areas. The main results from instrumental variable estimation show that the nurture effect is larger and more significant for fathers than for mothers. A deeper investigation of the mechanism behind this nurture effect informs us that a father's education passes on to his children's education partly through the income channel. Another notable finding is that even after controlling for fathers' income, parental education still has a significantly positive effect on children's education through the nurture effect. This indicates that beyond the income channel, there may exist other channels such as better home environment, which deserve to be explored in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of human capital on productivity using micro panel data of rural households in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, where a substantial job stratification is observed in terms of income and education. To clarify the mechanism underlying this stratification, the human capital effects are estimated for wages (individual level) and for self-employed activities (household level), and for farm and non-farm sectors. Estimation results show a clear contrast between farm and non-farm sectors—wages and productivity in non-farm activities rise with education at an increasing rate, whereas those in agriculture respond only to the primary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs and tests a model that incorporates relative deprivation into the migration decision. Relatively deprived individuals view their situations as less than a community standard. Another innovation of this paper is the utilization of a cluster approach to wage differentials. This cluster method takes account of individual characteristics while avoiding the severe multicollinearity problems inherent in the standard wage equation approach. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, relative deprivation is found to be a significant motivating factor in domestic migration decisions. The results also suggest that Mexico-US migration may be increasing relative deprivation in Mexican communities. For policymakers, the results indicate that policies attempting to slow domestic rural-to-urban migration must address both relative and absolute outcomes in communities. Investments in communities that raise aggregate incomes, but increase relative deprivation, could result in an increase in migration out of the community, not in a decrease as intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper looks at the effect schooling has had on household welfare in Sri Lanka during the 1990–2006 period, on average and across the welfare distribution. We account for the endogeneity of schooling using quantile instrumental variable estimation as developed in Chernozhukov, Fernández‐Val, and Kowalski ( ). We use pooled data from four cross‐sectional Household Income Expenditure Surveys. The results show that an extra year of schooling on the part of the most educated adult member in the household can increase welfare (proxied by real per capita consumption expenditure) by 3.8 percent on average. However, the effect varies considerably across the welfare distribution: At the lower end, around the 20th and 25th quantiles, an extra year of education increases welfare by 6 and 5 percent, respectively, while at the median it is around 3.5 percent. At the higher, 90th quantile it is much less, at 1 percent. Thus the marginal effect of schooling on welfare is significant and positive at all levels of the welfare distribution, but highest at the lower and middle quartiles. This result is different from findings in the literature that tend to show larger effects at higher quantiles, when endogeneity is uncorrected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we depart from the standard way of analyzing school enrollment by accounting explicitly for educational selectivity in order to examine the determinants of child school enrollment in Ghana. Using data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey round 6 (GLSS 6), we estimate a three-step sequential logit model for the determinants of secondary school enrollment and its dependence on completing primary school. We find that family resources such as parental education, household income and the gender of the head of the household play a role in households' child schooling decisions. Educated parents are relatively more likely to enroll their children in primary school and keep them in school until they complete primary education. As well, we show that educated parents do not promote a gender-biased investment in the schooling of children at the primary level. While household welfare does not influence children's entry into primary school importantly, their completion of primary school depends on household welfare. The study sheds more light on the pro-male bias phenomenon regarding entry into primary school and primary school completion. Policies to promote the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in Ghana must be grade sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positive relationship between institutional quality and "official" income is well documented. It is unclear, however, whether this relationship holds once the "unofficial" economy is accounted for. An improvement in institutional quality tends to shift production out of the shadow and into the official sector, resulting in an increase in official income. However, this shift comes at the expense of the informal economy, potentially negating the perceived gains in output. This paper uses data from 5,506 Brazilian municipalities to explore the effects of institutional quality on total income per person. We additionally estimate the effect of institutions on informal sector size. Our most robust finding suggests that higher‐quality institutions using our broadest measure are significantly related to development. While good institutions do decrease the size of the informal sector, the consequential switch to formality raises overall productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists are increasingly interested in subjective well‐being, but the economic literature on perceptions of income adequacy, which is one of the factors that shape subjective well‐being, is little. Our paper fills this lacuna. We utilize nationally representative data on perceptions of amounts considered as remunerative earnings from self‐employment in India and examine how these are earnings shaped by social identity, namely, caste. We also investigate if institutional change such as the introduction of an employment guarantee scheme alters these perceptions. Finally, we examine the relationship between caste identity and actual earnings. We find that caste identity does shape both perceptions of income adequacy and actual earnings: lower‐ranked groups perceive lower amounts as being remunerative and also earn lower amounts. Further, the employment guarantee scheme alters self‐perceptions differentially for different caste groups, but in more nuanced ways than our ex‐ante beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the effect of international trade on income growth depend on the economy’s level of development? More specifically, is trade more beneficial to lower income economies? Does trade contribute to a smaller international income inequality? The present paper seeks to answer these questions by employing the empirical model of Frankel and Romer (1999 ), which shows trade increases income growth in a cross section of 150 countries. We find evidence in support of the hypothesis that international trade benefits the lower income economies more than it benefits the higher income economies. This finding is robust in the presence of control variables including distance from the equator and institutional quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the impact of skill transfer on economic growth. Even if there are the benefits of backwardness and the ability to absorb them, the South may not exploit them, because the skilled workers in the North are not willing to come to the South owing to their high opportunity cost. It is shown that if the South's relative income is low, the South cannot offer high wages to attract skilled workers from the North, and stays in the low rank. But if its relative income is high enough, exploiting the benefits of backwardness, it attains high growth and converges to a relatively higher position. This prediction is consistent with the evidence that the world distribution of relative income has two peaks. The study also shows that an increase in human capital in the North increases the minimum requirement for human capital in the South to soar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationship between institutional quality, educational outcomes, and economic performance. More specifically, we seek to establish the linkages by which government effectiveness affects per capita income via its mediating impact on human capital formation. Our empirical approach adopts a two-stage strategy that estimates national-level educational production functions that include government effectiveness as a covariate, and uses these estimates as instruments for human capital in cross-country regressions of per capita income. Our results identify a significant and positive effect of human capital on per capita income levels, and partially resolves the inconsistency between macro- and micro-level studies of the effect of human capital on income. The results remain robust to alternative specifications, extension to a panel setting, subsamples of the data and fully endogenous institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of a universal health insurance mechanism, the increasing burden of out‐of‐pocket (OOP) health expenditure has become a growing concern in India. To cope with the cost of illness, people use either their savings and income, or they have to rely upon distress means of finance such as depletion of household assets, borrowings from banks and moneylenders, and contributions from family and friends. This paper analyses the changes that have taken place in the incidence and covariates of distress financing in India by using data from National Sample Survey Organisation for the years 2004 and 2014. Results indicate that during this period the incidence of distress sources as a means to finance OOP health expenditure has hovered around 50%. Further, the results reveal a significant socioeconomic gradient in the incidence of distress financing. Socioeconomic and health‐related covariates significantly impact the likelihood of distress financing as a means to cope with OOP health expenditure. The results indicate the need for government action to formulate a comprehensive plan through an increase in public spending on health care that will improve the quantity and quality of the public health‐care system and enhance the scope of health insurance in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private saving and economic growth are intimately linked, and low saving rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have often been held responsible for disappointing growth in the region. Thus, identifying factors that spur saving is critical. This paper surveys previous empirical studies on LAC, highlighting contradictions, omissions and in some cases inconclusiveness of findings. Relying on a large dataset and a nested econometric framework, it analyzes private saving patterns and explores the role of its determinants in LAC, across LAC sub-regions and compared with other regions. While the results highlight great heterogeneity in private saving rates within LAC and compared with the rest of the world, saving determinants are broadly the same notwithstanding some differences in sensitivity and contributions' sizes, and include its lag, income, demographics and public saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a multivariate causal analysis for: human development, demographic transition, urbanization, technology, sustainability, democracy/autocracy, good administration, and economic integration. A 15 × 18 causal coefficient matrix is estimated using a cross-country panel for the 1985-2010 quinquennia. Each matrix entry is estimated using three types of instrumented regressions: (a) levels regressions; (b) growth regressions; (c) growth regressions also containing the contemporary growth of independent variables. The instruments are the 1970-1980 values of the variables. It is found that from 1980 to 2005 income and human development reacted relatively quickly and positively to globalization. However, institutions changed slowly, and the fundamental long-term causes of divergence, namely demographic transition, urbanization, and technology, were weakly and even negatively affected by integration. The results also suggest human development and sustainability are complementary. Hence technology transfer to the poor and poor regions may provide a sustainable policy tool for development, promoting demographic transition, human development, and convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By making use of a simple general equilibrium model of a small open economy, the author examines the link between labor mobility and the size of wage inequality in the presence of productive public infrastructure. The paper shows that the provision of public infrastructure plays an important part in determining the size of labor inflow induced wage inequality. Specifically, it shows that, irrespective of the relative factor intensities, a small inflow of either skilled or unskilled labor does not affect the size of wage inequality if private industries derive equal benefits from public infrastructure provision. A small inflow of skilled (unskilled) labor increases (decreases) wage inequality if skilled (unskilled) labor intensive industry derives more benefits from public infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a two-country model of endogenous growth and international trade in intermediate goods. In autarky just one of the economies enjoys sustained growth. The trade situation may be characterized by complete specialization of both countries, or by incomplete specialization of the growing economy. In either case, trade transmits perpetual growth to the stagnant economy because of the permanent improvements in its terms of trade. The existence of a non-reproducible factor in the growing economy is crucial to ensure propagation of growth. Moreover, under incomplete specialization countries converge in per capita income. This result relies on two assumptions. First, there must be a large enough share of world income to pay for the input in which the stagnant economy has comparative advantage. Second, all technologies producing intermediate goods should be equally intensive in the non-reproducible factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain how the expansion of multinational firms in a developing economy affects its labor market variables, such as wages in indigenous firms, the average wage level and total employment. Three potential effects: the transfer of foreign knowledge and the associated technological change, diffusion of this knowledge among indigenous firms, and the inflow of the physical capital from abroad, are examined under two possible scenarios: fixed and unlimited labor supply. The results obtained depend on the organization of the labor market in the host country, differences in capital intensity between multinational and local sectors, the amount of physical capital transferred to the host country from abroad, as well as the magnitude of knowledge spillovers stemming from multinational activity to indigenous firms. The predictions of the model are more consistent with empirical observations reported in empirical studies than those of other theoretical studies existing in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between school attainment, school completion, and economic development. In doing so it also examines the effect of other macroeconomic variables on school attainment and completion. Estimation is conducted using a panel dataset of 138 countries. Our results show that income levels, government expenditure on education, and political instability all have significant effects on school completion and attainment. In addition these variables have different effects on male and female schooling. Our results have important policy implications and in particular allow policymakers to identify different instruments to target the problem of non-completion of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the mechanism of endogenous growth, this paper empirically investigates the impact of financial capital on economic growth for a panel of 60 developing countries, through the channel of domestic capital formation. By estimating the model for different income groups, it is found that while private FDI flows exert beneficial complementarity effects on the domestic capital formation across all income-group countries, the official financial flows contribute to increasing investment in the middle income economies, but not in the low income countries. The latter appears to demonstrate that the aid-growth nexus is supported in the middle income countries, whereas the misallocation of official inflows is more likely to exist in the low income countries, suggesting that aid effectiveness remains conditional on the domestic policy environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates wage effects of trade status of African firms. Using data for manufacturing firms, we find a positive overall association between individual earnings and export status. Moreover, the skill wage premium in exporting firms is significantly higher. These results are consistent with either trade inducing higher wages in the exporting country, or with more productive (higher wage) firms self-selecting into exporting. The results are not robust, however, to disaggregation by export destination. Exporting to outside Africa generates a negative wage premium whereas exporting to African markets yields a positive premium in export firms of the exporting country. This suggests that there is a disciplining effect on the wages of exporting firms only when exporting is to more competitive markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much of China’s recent economic performance can be attributed to market-oriented reforms introduced in the last two decades? A long-run perspective may be important for understanding the process of economic development occurring today. This paper compares the integration of rice markets in China today and 270 years ago. In the eighteenth century, transport technology was non-mechanized, but markets were close to being free. We distinguish local harvest and weather from aggregate sources of price variation in a historical sample and in a similarly constructed contemporary sample. Findings indicate the degree of market integration in the 1720s is a very good predictor of per capita income in the 1990s. Moreover, the current pattern of interregional income in China is strongly linked to persistent geographic factors that were already apparent several centuries ago, well before the enactment of modern reform programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper applies a new decomposition technique to the study of variations in poverty across the regions of Russia. The procedure, which is based on the Shapley value in cooperative game theory, allows the deviation in regional poverty levels from the all-Russia average to be attributed to three proximate sources: per capita income, inequality, and local prices. Contrary to expectation, regional poverty variations turn out to be due more to differences in inequality across regions than to differences in real income per capita. However, when real income per capita is split into nominal income and price components, differences in nominal incomes emerge as more important than either inequality or price effects for the majority of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between R&D and growth. The estimated elasticity of per capita R&D expenditures with respect to domestic per capita incomes lies between 1.81 and 2.93 for the ten OECD countries studied, whereas the elasticity of R&D with respect to foreign demand lies between 0.43 and 0.68. The paper introduces a “standard” GDP growth accounting equation where current productivity is a function of previous R&D. The results indicate that OLS estimates of spillovers from R&D have an upward bias of more than 40%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While technologies and policy fundamentals are presumably different internationally, inducing differences in growth rates, capital mobility can be a powerful force in equalizing output growth rates across countries. The paper provides some indirect evidence in support of this effect. In the context of regional growth, however, labor mobility can potentially equalize income levels across regions in the presence of human capital externalities. Supporting evidence is found for this effect, revealing that restrictions on labor flows tend to make per capita incomes more divergent across nations and/or regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper measures the impact of increasing trade openness between Mexico and the USA resulting from the North American Free Trade Agreement ( NAFTA) on the income of small versus large farmers in Mexico. Benefits resulting from higher prices of export goods as well as losses incurred from greater import competition are considered. First, relating NAFTA cuts in trade restrictions to border prices of Mexican exports and imports, it is found that NAFTA-induced tariff reductions decreased the border price of corn, Mexico's main agricultural import, and increased the border prices of tomatoes and melons, Mexico's main agricultural exports. Then, it is shown that the rise in fruit and vegetable prices benefited small farmers more than large farmers; while the drop in corn prices hurt large farmers more. Finally, the results from the regional-level analysis suggests that the effects are stronger in the central states than in the northern and southern states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential stabilization of output shocks through official assistance flows is investigated is this paper. It contributes to the current debate on aid instability and argues that official assistance might cope with exogenous output shocks in recipient countries and stabilize resources available for national expenditure, including consumption and investment. High aid dependency and vulnerability to output shocks positively affect the stabilization property of aid. Contrasting with the current literature, the paper documents that aid volatility is not a significant determinant of the stabilizing or destabilizing impact of aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable literature exists on the measurement of income inequality in China and its increasing trend. Much less is known about the driving forces of this trend and their quantitative contributions. Conventional decompositions, by factor components or by population subgroups, provide only limited information on the determinants of income inequality. This paper represents an early attempt to apply the regression-based decomposition framework to the study of inequality accounting in rural China, using household-level data. It is found that geography has been the dominant factor but is becoming less important in explaining total inequality. Capital input emerges as a most significant determinant of income inequality. Farming structure is more important than labor and other inputs in contributing to income inequality across households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raising wages has commonly been viewed as an anticorruption policy by policymakers from both governments and multilateral development organizations. Conventional wisdom and recent theoretical work suggest that low wages encourage corruption. Nevertheless, the empirical studies done on the wage– corruption tradeoff are econometric estimates that find no conclusive support for the effectiveness of increasing wages as an anticorruption measure. The unique contributions of this paper are the application of an expected utility model to explain the emergence of corruption, and the use of comparative static results that are consistent with the empirical evidence and useful for the design of anticorruption policies. The most important result from the expected utility model is that anticorruption policies designed to increase the net income of potentially corrupt agents not only may be ineffective but may actually encourage corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines changes in the extent of poverty in Iran in the period 1983 to 1993. More specifically, it investigates the contributions of growth and redistribution factors to changes in poverty over this period of ten years. The analysis is based on household-level data relating to three Household Income and Expenditures Surveys of 1983, 1988, and 1993. The study reveals that the extent of poverty in the rural sector declined slightly, whereas in the urban sector it increased significantly. Decomposition of changes in poverty into growth and redistribution components indicates that in each sector the redistribution component was positive, implying that the deterioration of income inequality contributed to the worsening of poverty. The growth component, however, affected the two sectors differently: it contributed to a reduction in poverty in rural areas and an increase in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eliminating poverty is a multifaceted global challenge and a focal point of global development governance. With the implementation of targeted poverty alleviation (TPA), China's poverty alleviation efforts have had significant achievements. This study provides a new perspective by classifying poverty‐stricken households based on poverty root causes at the household level, a multi‐propensity score weighting model based on counterfactual inference is employed to examine the poverty reduction effect and policy precision on six non‐equivalent poverty‐stricken household groups in a Chinese county. The results reveal that the poverty reduction effects differed among poverty‐stricken households with different root causes of poverty. Specifically, households impoverished due to disability have the lowest income of the six groups. The assistance policy effects also vary significantly and are found to be poorly suited to poverty‐stricken households a lack of labor force and funds. A robustness test confirms this conclusion and a more nuanced analysis reveals that these differences are reflected in the wage and transfer incomes. Therefore, to ensure the stability of poverty reduction and the sustainability of income for poverty‐stricken households, relevant associated aid policies need to place different emphases based on their household characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in rural livelihoods and household well‐being. Therefore, this study examines the impact of ICT adoption on farmers' decisions to access credit and the joint effects of ICT adoption and access to credit on household income using 2016 China Labour‐force Dynamics Survey data. Both recursive bivariate probit model and a selectivity‐corrected ordinary least square regression model are employed for the analysis. The results show that ICT adoption increases the probability of access to credit by 12.8% in rural China and empowers rural women and farm households in relatively less‐developed regions to access credit. ICT adoption and access to credit affect household income differently. ICT adoption significantly increases household income, while access to credit significantly reduces it, primarily because farmers do not use the acquired credit to invest in income‐generating farm and off‐farm business activities. ICT adoption has the largest positive impact on household income at the highest 90th quantile. Our findings suggest that improving rural ICT infrastructure to enhance farmers' ICT adoption and developing ICT‐based financial products to enable households to access sufficient funds can improve rural household welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet is integral to modern living. While the Internet is ubiquitous in China's urban areas, its uptake is still lagging in the country's rural regions—the development potential of the Internet remains untapped, and despite China's steep economic growth during the 21st century, the living standards in its rural regions remain low. The Internet can accelerate rural development in China. This study is focused on analyzing whether and to what extent Internet use affects consumption diversity, an indicator of the quality of life, in rural China. To this end, we employ the instrumental‐variable‐based two‐stage endogenous treatment regression model to analyze the 2018 China Family Panel Studies survey data. The modeling approach allows us to account for the endogeneity of Internet use. The results show that consumption diversity is positively associated with Internet use. Furthermore, it rises with household income, household size, and wealth. Whether the Internet is accessed via smartphones or computers has no bearing on household consumption diversity. We also find that education, household income, and wealth increase one's predicted probability of using the Internet. The results also point to regional differences in consumption diversity and the likelihood of using the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Civil servants such as teachers and doctors allocate their resources into service delivery that benefits society, and alternative efforts for income. With low salary or high cost of service delivery, or high value of alternative efforts, the latter may be chosen extensively. This may mean leaving one's job. Some idealists may focus loyally and exclusively on service delivery despite the challenges. Choosing alternative efforts cannot be eradicated, but its role can be reduced if one is aware of the logic of which factors impact how actors allocate their resources between service delivery and alternative efforts. We have used data from the education and healthcare sectors in the African countries of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Senegal to show the deficient and poor service delivery within education and healthcare services. In both sectors, education and healthcare, and for all four countries, teachers spend far less than the designated time teaching pupils, and clinicians spend very little time with patients, per day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a nationally representative longitudinal survey and both absolute and relative measures of mobility, we examine the differences in income mobility across social groups in rural India over 1993–2004 and 2004–2011. We find significant differentials in income mobility that mirror the historical Indian caste system hierarchy. Conditional on having similar rankings in base‐period income distribution, the Forward Hindu Caste households have the highest (lowest) probability of upward (downward) income mobility, followed by the Other Backward Caste, Scheduled Caste, and Scheduled Tribe households. Moreover, these differentials in mobility are only partially explained by differences in household characteristics. We find similar but smaller differentials in mobility across social groups in Urban India. We also find that urban population witnessed a higher (lower) upward (downward) mobility during 2004–2011 compared with rural population. Furthermore, we find similar differentials in mobility using consumption as a measure of well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes data from the 2009 and 2014 waves of the Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) to investigate the impact of parents' pension status on migrants' consumption in cities. Exploiting the introduction of the new rural pension scheme (NRPS), we perform a difference‐in‐differences (DID) analysis. We find that having a parent in a rural area that is pension eligible increases migrants' consumption level by 9.4%. However, this effect is constrained to survival consumption. Furthermore, the positive impact of parents' pension eligibility is more pronounced for migrants who earn a lower income, receive less education, suffer from poorer health, have stronger economic ties with their parents, and have a parent in poorer health. Our results suggest that improving rural social welfare has a spillover effect on urban consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 65 countries over the period 1980-2003, this paper investigates the role that cultural dimensions play in the process of technological change, innovation and adoption and consequently on the steady state level of output per worker and its growth, using spatial econometrics techniques to account for spatial dependence between countries. Initial findings indicate that differences across cultural dimensions act as a leveling effect but not as long run growth determinants. In addition, when controlling for physical and human capital accumulation, culture plays a much smaller role in explaining differences in income per capita than initially thought, with little effect on output per worker growth along the transitional dynamics path. Spatial econometric considerations are relevant in explaining differences across rates of growth of per worker output, but not in terms of steady-state levels of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a formal theory of the endogenous process of the introduction of high quality production in developing countries. Initial differences in income and capital and transaction costs are shown to affect the emergence of and the size of the high quality economy. Initial differences in the production structure and the nature of transaction costs-as well as the possibility of contracting between producers and processors-are shown to determine which producers are included in the high quality economy, and which not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a case study of the remittance behavior of immigrants in Greece. In addition to some of the usual factors affecting remittance behavior, it examines five factors than have received little attention in the literature: relative deprivation, existence of property in the country of origin, expectation on inheritance, stability of employment, and more than one migrant in the family. We use Heckman's selection model with survey data from 607 immigrants. Significant factors for the decision to remit are the existence of children living with the migrant, stability of employment, and gender. The basic factors affecting the size of remittances are the level of income, the existence of children living with the migrant, and the length of time in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the persistence of transient income shocks to farm households in rural Indonesia. Persistence is defined as the elasticity of a household's 1997 household per capita income with respect to its 1993 per capita income, controlling for time-invariant characteristics of the household. Local rainfall levels are used as an exogenous source of transitory variation in 1993 income. Four main conclusions emerge. First, roughly 30% of household income shocks remain after four years. Second, the persistence of negative and positive shocks is approximately equal; if anything, positive shocks last longer. Third, neither positive nor negative income shocks disproportionately affect poor households. Finally, measurement error in income and unobserved household heterogeneity are important sources of bias. These findings cast doubt on common arguments advocating public intervention to stabilize or redistribute income, and suggest that anti-poverty policy should address more permanent causes of household poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intimate partner violence is an important global health problem that remains ill understood. Several studies have documented that female empowerment may increase violence against women—the so‐called "male backlash." We propose a utilitarian explanation for this phenomenon, based on the assumption that violence may be used as an instrument to affect the distribution of the household surplus between the spouses. Our main result is that promoting norms of gender equity (or otherwise enhancing the prospects of divorced women) may inadvertently promote violence against women in settings where production outcomes are uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a series of studies regarding poverty in China. The study by researchers Lars Osberg and Kuan Xu on the selection of poverty line and poverty indicator. Researchers Guanghua Wan and Yin Zhang explore the reasons behind the severity of poverty in inland than in coastal China. The study by researchers Meiyan Wang and Fang Cai focus on the issue of sex discrimination in urban China in the post-reform era.

This article examines the role of intra‐household bargaining power on household expenditure patterns in Iran to see whether women's empowerment can achieve similar results in Iran as we have seen it achieve in other countries of the world. This study is insightful because it tells us whether Iranian women, who have experienced both economic and noneconomic constraints over many years, can utilize increased power toward economic development. The bargaining power is measured by the sex ratio in the marriage market. Using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey in Iran, we find that greater bargaining power of women contributes significantly toward greater provision of education and health expenditure within the household, creating a potential for an increase in welfare for the next generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inefficiency of state‐owned enterprises, followed by the economic reform in urban China, resulted in large‐scale retrenchment during the late1990s. The laid‐off workers were middle‐aged, not well educated and had accumulated a lot of firm‐specific human capital that was unlikely to be of value in the product market. In this study, we investigate how differently human capital affects laid‐off workers' occupation choices: self‐employment, re‐employment and remaining unemployed. Using 2002 Chinese Household Income Project and 2009 Urban Household Survey datasets, we find that although general human capital measured by education is positively related to the probability of finding a job, it is negatively associated with the probability of self‐employment. Displaced workers with more sector‐specific work experience are more likely to be self‐employed than to be employed by others. Government‐sponsored training significantly increases the likelihood of finding a job. Health is positively associated with re‐employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protecting consumption from the effects of uninsured risk is vital for rural farming households, who tend to be poor and live close to subsistence level. Income uncertainty and habit formation play important roles in the consumption and savings. Variability in weather conditions has a strong linkage with variability in agricultural income in developing countries. This study analyzes consumption and saving decisions of rural farm households in India. Using household panel data for 4 years, we estimated consumption equation accounting for habit formation under income uncertainty. Our findings suggest an evidence for habit formation among rural households. Additionally, we found that both annual and seasonal weather risks significantly influence savings among rural households. Findings from this study also suggest a robust and vibrant farm economy and that the nonfarm economy could contribute to the economic well‐being of rural farming households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]