There are two divergent perspectives on the impact of subcontracting on firms in the informal sector. According to the benign view, formal sector firms prefer linkages with relatively modern firms in the informal sector, and subcontracting enables capital accumulation and technological improvement in the latter. According to the exploitation view, formal sector firms extract surplus from stagna...

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on productivity in Vietnam. The gradual opening up of markets to trade over the course of the last decade culminating with the WTO accession in 2007 makes Vietnam an ideal case for exploring this issue. We use microdata on the population of manufacturing enterprises for the period 2001 to 2010 and match these to data on exports and impo...

Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Regional Inequality in China We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economicand TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion of new technology and its regional spr...

The authors performed a comprehensive time series segmentation study on the 36 Nikkei Japanese industry indices from 1 January 1996 to 11 June 2010. From the temporal distributions of the clustered segments, we found that the Japanese economy never fully recovered from the extended 1997– 2003 crisis, and responded to the most recent global financial crisis in five stages. Of these, the second a...

This paper investigates the recent trends in poverty and inequality since the 1990s, and decomposes poverty reduction to see who has benefited most from China’s economic growth. We find that first, by several measures poverty has declined significantly across a wide range of poverty lines during the 1990s, except for a slight increase in 1997-99 for lower poverty lines. Second, economic growth ...

  There is a significant relationship between economic growth and the degree of urban concentration, as measured by primacy or the share of the largest city in an urban system. In accordance to urban economic theories, there is an inverse-U shape relationship between urban concentration –urban primacy- and economic growth. That is, as economy grows, urban concentration increases, approaches a...

This paper examines the transformation of the Iranian economy through the Twentieth Century within a global context. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of 21 century, Iran had transformed into a complex and relatively large economy with important consequences for the eco...

The paper focuses on institutional change and institution building as integral parts of economic transition in China. China’s success, particularly compared with other advanced transition economies, implies a puzzling observation: China did not apply theoretically-derived policy recommendations. Instead, authorities followed a gradual, pragmatic approach to reform, decentralize, and transform t...

Development is a process that is full of uncertainties, and even more so is the process of transition from the planned economy to a market oriented one. Because of the uncertainties and country specificity, development must be a process of learning, selective adaptation, and augmentation and upgrade. This paper attempts to distill lessons from China’s reform and opening up process, and to inves...

Using a gravity model of trade and the U.S. and Chinese panel data, I present evidence that supports the views that linguistic links have become more important in foreign trade than geographical proximity and that linguistic influence on trade is more significant in China than in the U.S. The estimated result based on a broad panel of economies shows little overall relation between religious si...