The central government of the People’s Republic of China enacted a fiscal reform known as the “Province-Managing-County” (PMC) reform in the early 2000s. This reform eliminated the prefecture city government as the intermediate layer between the province and the county. We apply a difference-in-difference method using a panel data set of 263 cities nationwide over the period of 1999-2011 to exa...

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough political coalition supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. We find that optimal marginal capital taxes are either progressive or U-shaped, so that savings are subsidized for th...

This paper tests the hypothesis that increasing stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI) can lead to de facto decentralization in the form of autonomous reform experiments by subnational leaders. Because these reform experiments may attract FDI in subsequent years, there is a possibility of endogeneity. As a result, the methodology is a simultaneous equation model of 61 Vietnamese provinces be...

The U.S. federal government is facing the prospect of exponentially rising entitlement obligations that are threatening to push the debt-to-GDP ratio to historically unparalleled levels. In an effort to understand the economic consequences of these projected debt run-ups, this paper takes a stand on how future policy must adjust and examines its implications for the aggregate economy. Assuming ...

here's a curious symmetry between the arguments propounded over the last century in advocacy of socialism and the present popular discussion of the reform of centrally planned economies. In those old discussions, the vision of socialism was utopian, which was contrasted with the Dickensian realities of capitalism. Now, the disasters of central planning are contrasted with the benefits flowing f...

Among the noncommunicable diseases, mental ill-health represents the major threat to social and economic progress because it impacts so powerfully on the most critical decades of life. Consequently, mental health reform is increasingly recognized as an urgent priority worldwide. This brings into sharp focus the role of evidence, and more specifically the Cochrane paradigm, in influencing decisi...

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question by focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men’s conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ult...

As the experience of Russia and some Eastern European countries has demonstrated, economic reform is difficult to carry out when the rank-and-file officials or bureaucrats to whom authorities must turn to implement change resist the reforms in order to protect their vested interests. Drawing on an unusual longitudinal survey data set for a representative rural county in northern China, we show ...

This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty, economic growth and trade, it reports modelling results showing that farm product markets remain the most cos...

China’s economic inequalities between rural and urban regions were high but stable during the centrally planned period. Since the inception of reforms in 1978, the disparities have exhibited a marked cyclical pattern: the declines in early years were followed by a period of increases and then by renewed declines. We find that the sharp sectoral divide in the planning episode was a result of ind...