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Land reform has been perceived to be a major avenue for poverty reduction, amid controversies regarding the impacts of land reform in developing economies. This paper demonstrates how China's land reform in the 1950s succeeded in reducing hunger and poverty. To be more specific, our paper constructs a theoretical model, deriving hypotheses with respect to the welfare effects of land reform in general. The hypotheses are then empirically tested using a unique data set from China. Our identification strategy of combining propensity score matching (PSM) with Differences-in-Differences (DID) estimations ensures the reliability of causal inferences and analytical results. The paper concludes that China's land reform in the 1950s significantly improved the welfare of peasants in terms of subsistence living while its effect on non-subsistence welfare was insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an indicator measuring the likelihood for an economy to escape the middle income trap (MIT) and then estimates the impact of income inequality on this indicator using 1960‐2019 cross‐country data. Major findings include the following: (1) The likelihood of escaping MIT is relatively large for Asia, followed by Europe, Africa, North America and South America. (2) Inequality is negatively and significantly correlated with the MIT indicator, particularly in freer, high‐income and MIT country groups. (3) Regarding the mechanisms, domestic investment, human capital accumulation and trade openness contribute positively to this indicator, while ageing does the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic arsenic exposures via the consumption of contaminated drinking water are clearly associated with many deleterious health outcomes, including anemia. Following exposure, trivalent inorganic arsenic (AsIII) is methylated through a series of arsenic (+III oxidation state) methyltransferase (As3MT)-dependent reactions, resulting in the production of several intermediates with greater toxicity than the parent inorganic arsenicals. The extent to which inorganic vs. methylated arsenicals contribute to AsIII-induced hematotoxicity remains unknown. In this study, the contribution of As3MT-dependent biotransformation to the development of anemia was evaluated in male As3mt-knockout (KO) and wild-type, C57BL/6J, mice following 60-day drinking water exposures to 1 mg/L (ppm) AsIII. The evaluation of hematological indicators of anemia revealed significant reductions in red blood cell counts, hemoglobin levels, and hematocrit in AsIII-exposed wild-type mice as compared to unexposed controls. No such changes in the blood of As3mt-KO mice were detected. Compared with unexposed controls, the percentages of mature RBCs in the bone marrow and spleen (measured by flow cytometry) were significantly reduced in the bone marrow of AsIII-exposed wild-type, but not As3mt-KO mice. This was accompanied by increased levels of mature RBCS in the spleen and elevated levels of circulating erythropoietin in the serum of AsIII-exposed wild-type, but not As3mt-KO mice. Taken together, the findings from the present study suggest that As3MT-dependent biotransformation has an essential role in mediating the hematotoxicity of AsIII following drinking water exposures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between economic growth and inequality by employing the artificial neural network approach. There are many important findings. First, this work reveals the underlying functional form of economic growth and inequality by using three‐dimensional diagrams. Second, the findings show that there was an inverted‐U relationship between economic growth and inequality. This explains apparent contradictions in research findings in the literature. Third, the optimal level of inequality, which corresponds to the highest level of economic growth, is computed for different economies. Our findings were confirmed by the development processes in many developing countries and also in China in recent years, thereby highlighting the importance of inequality alleviation in promoting further economic growth. These findings enable us to derive pragmatic policy implications for other developing countries at different stages of economic development in achieving sustainable growth with equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does health aid help reduce infant mortality? Despite a growing literature, existing findings have no consensus. To investigate the relationship between health aid and infant mortality, this paper applies polynomial inverse lag (PIL) framework to panel data from 131 countries over the period 2002–2019, and focuses on the instant and long-term impacts of health aid on infant mortality. The results indicate that health aid can effectively reduce infant mortality and it has a greatest effect in the current year. More specifically, a 1% rise in health aid causes a 1.53% drop in infant mortality instantly, though the impact tails off over time. The results maintain robustness across specifications. Heterogeneity test shows that health aid's benign impact is more pronounced in deep poverty countries. Finally, it is found that aid raises public health expenditure of recipient countries, leading to a better health care system and a lower infant mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mission of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to achieve shared prosperity through cross‐border trade, investment flows, connectivity, people bond, and policy coordination. This motivates us to explore and evaluate the distributive effects of trade and investments under the BRI, as it offers a quasi‐natural experiment for impact evaluation by taking the BRI economies as the treatment group and other countries as the control group. Estimation results show that the BRI has generated benign distributive impacts, as the Gini estimates in BRI economies are significantly reduced after the implementation of the BRI. Further, the benign distributive impacts are found to come from imports from China. More specifically, imports from China that are complementary to local labor inputs are positively correlated with labor participation, thereby helping raise the labor share in national income and reduce income inequality. Conversely, imports of machinery, agricultural products, minerals, and so on from China are found to be negatively correlated with the GDP share of the primary industry. In other words, they help promote industrialization and urbanization in BRI economies, which are expected to lead to better income distribution in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2008.01127.x Byline: Guanghua Wan (1), Amelia U. Santos-Paulino (1) Author Affiliation: (1)UNU-WIDER

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2008.01131.x Byline: Mahvash Saeed Qureshi (1), Guanghua Wan (2) Abstract: By exploring the export performances and specialisation patterns of China and India, we assess their trade competitiveness and complementarity vis-a-vis each other as well as with the rest of the world. Our analysis indicates that (a) India faces tough competition from China in the third markets especially in clothing, textiles and leather products; (b) there is a moderate potential for expanding trade between the two countries; (c) China poses a challenge for the East Asian economies, the US, and most European countries especially in medium-technology industries; (d) India appears to be a competitor mainly for its neighbouring South Asian countries; (e) complementarity exists between the imports of China and India, and the exports of the US, some European states and East Asian countries, especially Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, implying opportunities for trade expansion; and finally (f) the export structure of China is changing with the exports of skill-intensive and high-technology products increasing and those of labour-intensive products decreasing gradually. This suggests that challenges created by China in traditional labour-intensive products might reduce in the long run. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Cambridge and (2)UNU-WIDER

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2005.11.002 Byline: Yin Zhang, Guanghua Wan Keywords: China; Trade balance; Real exchange rate; Structural VAR; Law of one price Abstract: This paper proposes a structural VAR model which extends the frameworks of Hoffmaister and Roldos [Hoffmaister, A. W., & Roldos, J. E. (2001). The sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in developing countries: Brazil and Korea. Journal of Macroeconomics, 23, 213-239] and Prasad [Prasad, E. S. (1999). International trade and the business cycle. Economic Journal, 109, 588-606]. The model is then used to analyse the sources of China's trade balance fluctuations in the period of 1985-2000. Efforts are made to distinguish the forces which underlie the long-run trend in trade balance from those with transitory impacts. The effects of four types of shock are examined -- the foreign supply shock, the domestic supply shock, the relative demand shock and the nominal shock. Among other findings, two emerge as important. First, the movements in China's trade balance are largely the result of real shocks. Second, the Renminbi is undervalued, yet changes in the exchange rate bear little on the trade balance. Therefore, monetary measures would not suffice to redress China's trade 'imbalance'. Author Affiliation: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The United Nations University, Katajanokanlaituri 6 B, FIN-00160 Helsinki, Finland Article History: Received 4 March 2004; Revised 22 February 2005; Accepted 13 November 2005

A study demonstrating that the differences in the exchange rates of host countries of foreign direct investment (FDI), affect their competition for FDI, is presented.

A study of the regression-based approach to inequality decomposition in the literature exposes their drawbacks and suggests a more flexible framework that can be used with any inequality indicator and that imposes few restrictions on the specification of the underlying income-generating function. Policy implications to reduce regional inequality in rural China are discussed.

Arsenic exposure poses numerous threats to human health. Our previous work in mice has shown that arsenic causes anemia by inhibiting erythropoiesis. However, the impacts of arsenic exposure on human erythropoiesis remain largely unclear. We report here that low-dose arsenic exposure inhibits the erythroid differentiation of human hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs). The impacts of arsenic (in the form of arsenite; As3+) on red blood cell (RBC) development was evaluated using a long-term culture of normal human bone marrow CD34+-HPCs stimulated in vitro to undergo erythropoiesis. Over the time course studied, we analyzed the expression of the cell surface antigens CD34, CD71 and CD235a, which are markers commonly used to monitor the progression of HPCs through the stages of erythropoiesis. Simultaneously, we measured hemoglobin content, which is an important criterion used clinically for diagnosing anemia. As compared to control, low-dose As3+ exposure (100 nM and 500 nM) inhibited the expansion of CD34+-HPCs over the time course investigated; decreased the number of committed erythroid progenitors (BFU-E and CFU-E) and erythroblast differentiation in the subsequent stages; and caused a reduction of hemoglobin content. These findings demonstrate that low-dose arsenic exposure impairs human erythropoiesis, likely by combined effects on various stages of RBC formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]