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This paper uses a unique dataset of long‐run migration in China to provide new measures of cultural distance based on biological evidence. We utilise this information to examine the effect of cultural distance on migration in China from the Song Dynasty until the twentieth century. Our findings show that culture has strong effects on migration between regions when controlling for other socio‐economic and geographical factors. Population flow is greater where there are fewer cultural differences. This finding not only provides quantitative empirical evidence on linking cultural distance and migration but also leads to a better understanding of the mechanisms resulting in migration for much of China's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates how highways affected industrial development in China's peripheral regions between 1998 and 2007, a period during which China experienced rapid growth in highway mileage. Highways between major cities pass through some counties but not others. Based on this difference in counties' access to highways, we conduct a difference-in-difference propensity score matching estimation, with the treatment variables being counties' highway connection status and their industrial performance before and after being connected to a highway. We find that highways promote industrial development in counties with higher output and greater investment levels. Moreover, highways have differential impacts across industries and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political trajectory of agribusiness firms called 'dragon head enterprises' in China's ongoing agri-food transformations. It starts from the premise that state and private elites in China are working together to consolidate a robust domestic agribusiness sector, as both an arena for national-level rural and economic development, and a new frontier for access to resources and markets abroad. Through analyses of policy documents, market share data and ethnographic materials, I explore the organization and operation of dragon heads in the pork sector. My findings reveal that agribusiness development in China's pork sector is largely domestic, has a mixed state-private form and tends to marginalize the foreign-based TNCs that have been the most powerful actors in the global agri-food system to date. I argue that China is not only a destination for 'external' transnational capital, but also a site of agribusiness development in its own right. This has important implications for analysing capitalist transformations and for engaging global agri-food politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including volatility of Chinese economic activities, globalization and industrial performance in China, and regional disparities and productivity in China.

Empirical research on the determinants of regional economic development typically neglects the influence of culture. This study fills that gap by attempting to establish a causal linkage between culture and economic development in the Chinese context. Our empirical analyses are based on a comprehensive economic statistics of China's provinces and prefectures during 1978 to 2008. We use Protestantism as a proxy for culture because Protestant ethic has been linked to the spirit of capitalism and commercial culture in Weber's famous work. To isolate the exogenous variation in culture measure, historical Protestant dissemination is employed as instruments. The estimation results suggest that Christian commercial culture has a significantly positive impact on economic performance - per capita GDP after other important influences (i.e., capital, population, human resources, institutional quality, trade, infrastructure, geography, etc.) are controlled for. We also find heterogeneous effects of culture on economic development in different regions of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the major factors of growth of Hong Kong using a fairly new approach, which allows the direct inclusion of the factors of growth in the growth equation to be estimated. The growth factors that are found to be important for Hong Kong are physical capital accumulation, (negative) growth of unskilled workers, education, technology spillover (from foreign countries) through retained import of capital goods and inward direct investment, and learning-by-doing through import and domestic manufacturing production. The results strongly suggest that other than primary factor accumulation, education, trade, and foreign direct investment have contributed a lot to the growth of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. This research analyzes the spatial patterns of regional development in China through the change of population density functions from 1982 to 1990, using several online digital data sets. To minimize the influence of physical environment on population densities, the study areas are limited to four major plains of China: the Northeast (Dongbei), North China (Huabei) and Hubei-Hunan (Lianghu) Plains, and the Sichuan Basin. A gravity-based delineation approach is used to delineate the influence regions of 17 cities. Regional densities in China decline with distance from a city, similar to western countries. In addition, areas close to central cities grew faster than remote areas, described as a trend of centralization. However, regions with strong core growth are generally associated with stagnant hinterlands ('core growth-hinterland stagnation'); and regions with moderate core growth are usually matched by similar growth rates in the hinterlands ('spread through growth'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growth has recently been spectacularly high but there have been expressions of concern about its uneven regional distribution. It has been asserted that this has been partly due to national financial institutions (mainly state-owned banks) redirecting deposits from poor to rich regions and that this will be improved by smaller regionally-focussed institutions. We test these propositions using both informal analysis and more formal econometrics employing recent panel time-series methods. We find that (i) there is no evidence that deposits are siphoned off from the poor provinces for loans in rich provinces; (ii) financial disparities are positively related to output disparities, (iii) the link is stronger for rural credit co-operatives than for state-owned banks and (iv) the relationship is causal in both the long and short runs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the implications of China's rapid economic growth on the demand for energy and minerals, especially on the demand for these products imported from Australia. Since China's rapid growth is likely to continue for about another two decades, its demand for energy and minerals will expand as well. Nonetheless, as the share of manufacturing decreases, the expansion in demand for energy and minerals in China will slow over that period. While China's aggregate demand for energy and minerals will not expand as rapidly as its economy, its import needs, including imports from Australia, will increase more rapidly than its economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]