With the reforms of the Chinese economy, an enormous new moving population of rural-urban migrants is transforming the rural and urban labor force. Expected rural-urban income differences are used instead of absolute income diversity, namely the migrant is motivated by predictable income streams over time rather than by current earnings. Also, the employment opportunity is not exclusive determi...

BACKGROUND India has the world's highest total number of under-five deaths of any nation. While progress towards Millennium Development Goal 4 has been documented at the state level, little information is available for greater disaggregation of child health markers within states. In 2000, new states were created within the country as a partial response to political pressures. State-level inform...

Microcredit scheme is an important poverty alleviation method that facilitates the development of rural communities by creating and developing income-generating activities, especially for low-income women. The present study was aimed to examine the effectiveness of the microcredit fund scheme on the economic empowerment of rural women in Tehran Province, Iran. It was carried out by a survey met...

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We use a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and find that the respondents care to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in developed countries, the concern for relative standing seems to be equally strong among rural households in C...

BACKGROUND Studies from high income countries (HIC) have generally shown higher osteoporotic fracture rates in urban areas than rural areas. Low bone mineral density (BMD) increases susceptibility to fractures. This review aimed to assess whether urbanicity is consistently associated with lower BMD globally. METHOD Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Global Health (-April 2013) were searched for articl...

Residential demand for electricity is estimated for China using a unique household level dataset. Household electricity demand is specified as a function of local electricity price, household income, and a number of social-economic variables at household level. We find that the residential demand for electricity responds rather sensitively to its own price in China, which implies that there is ...

This paper investigates the effect of horizontal corporate group (keiretsu) affiliation on effective tax rates in Japan. After controlling for variables that affect corporate income taxes, keiretsu firms have lower effective tax rates than independent firms. These findings are attributed to political power and the unique corporate governance mechanism of keiretsu groups. Furthermore, horizontal...

Since the mid-1980s, hundreds of millions of Chinese rural laborers have left the countryside to work in towns and cities and it is projected that this number will grow. The current rural-urban migration tide in China may be one of history’s biggest labor movements, however, it has not been fully studied due to limited data availability. This paper uses the micro level data that cover the broad...