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Large numbers of agricultural labor moved from the countryside to cities after the economic reforms in China. Migration and remittances play an important role in transforming the structure of rural household income. This article examines the impact of rural-to-urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in a mountainous area of Hubei province using the data of a 2002 household survey. Since migration income is a potential substitute for farm income, we present counterfactual scenarios of what rural income, poverty, and inequality would have been in the absence of migration. Our results show that, by providing alternatives to households with lower marginal labor productivity in agriculture, migration leads to an increase in rural income. In contrast to many studies that suggest that the increasing share of nonfarm income in total income widens inequality, this article offers support for the hypothesis that migration tends to have egalitarian effects on rural income for three reasons: (1) migration is rational self-selection—farmers with higher expected return in agricultural activities and/or in local nonfarm activities choose to remain in the countryside while those with higher expected return in urban nonfarm sectors migrate; (2) households facing binding constraints of land supply are more likely to migrate; (3) poorer households benefit disproportionately from migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we demonstrate highly efficient anti-Stokes signal generation inside an irregular multicore microstructure fiber, using unamplified femtosecond laser pulses. For this special type of fiber, there are randomly distributed cores with a diameter ranging from 0.6 to 1.5 μm. We have observed a large ratio of the amplitude of the anti-Stokes wave to that of the pump wave in the output spectrum. Our simulation results indicate that the features of the two zero-dispersion wavelengths of the fiber are responsible for meeting the phase-matching condition of four-wave mixing, which produces the observed large anti-Stokes wave. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 48: 389–393, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.21359 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]