Ming Lu

Fudan University · Department of Economics

Though Mandarin is China's common language, each region/city has its own dialect. Using a unique self-collected data set, this paper estimates returns to dialect familiarity in China’s largest and most developed city, Shanghai. We evaluate migrant workers’ comprehension and fluency of the Shanghai dialect, and instrument their dialect fluency by de...

This paper provides a literature review on urbanization in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Research findings indicate that the PRC's urbanization is incomplete: its level of urbanization lags behind its industrialization and development status, and while there are too many small cities, the large cities are not large enough. This is mainly be...

The extent to which the quantity and quality of education is capitalized into housing prices is a key issue in understanding the relationship between allocation of educational resources and the housing market. Using monthly panel data of 52 residential areas in Shanghai and employing a natural experiment of designating Shanghai Experimental Model S...

Purpose This paper aims to answer the following questions concerning rural‐to‐urban labor migration in China: What is the impact of discrimination against non‐Hukou in urban public service provision? Will such discrimination disappear in the future within the current policy‐making framework? What is the result of such an endogenous policy change as...

This paper assesses both interregional and intraregional innovation inequality in China from 1995 to 2006. It is revealed that the east–central–west inequality has increased over time, whereas the inter‐provincial inequality showed a V‐pattern until 2003; Both inequality measures oscillated from 2004 to 2006. Using a decomposition framework recentl...

This paper provides a new explanation for China’s extremely low consumption-to-GDP ratio, highlighting the constraints of the “household registration system” (Hukou) on China’s household consumption. Our baseline results show that the consumption of migrants without an urban Hukou is 30.7% lower than that of urban residents. Moreover, consumption h...

China's recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-region income inequality in China. This paper discusses China's globalization process and estimates an income generating function, incorporating trade and FDI va...

How significantly inter-industry wage differentials contribute to rising income inequality is an essential policy issue for transitional economies. Using regression-based inequality decomposition, this paper finds that inter-industrial wage differentials contributed increasingly to income inequality in urban China through 1988, 1995, and 2002, main...

China’s recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-region income inequality in China. This paper discusses China’s globalization process and estimates an income generating function, incorporating trade and FD...

This paper presents the impact of income inequality on the subjective wellbeing of three different social groups in urban China. We classify urban social groups according to their hukou status: rural migrants, gbornh urban residents, and gacquiredh urban residents who had changed their hukou identity from rural to urban. We focus on how the income...

Party membership and social networks, as two forms of nonmarket power, have significant effects on personal income and act as driving forces of inequality in China. Do the effects vary across different ownership sectors (suoyouzhi xingshi)? Using a nationally representative survey of urban households (China Household Income Project surveys in 1995...

An entry barrier in the labor market can be an important source of wage inequality. This paper finds that social networks, father's education and political status, and urban household registration status (hukou identity), as well as their own education, experience, age, and gender, help people enter high-wage industries. When contrasting coastal an...

The year 1996 was a turning point both in terms of Chinese labor market reform and in China's economic growth pattern. Before 1996, labor market reform was mainly implemented through adjustment of people's occupation and income structure. Since 1996, employment restructuring has led to differentiation in terms of employment status. Labor market ref...

In this paper, we use the "2002 Chinese Household Income Project Survey" (CHIP2002) data to examine how heterogeneous social interactions affect the peer effect in the rural-urban migration decision in China. We find that the peer effect, measured by the village migration ratio, significantly increases the individual probability of outward migratio...

Using survey data of enterprises and entrepreneurs from Liuzhou, Guangxi, China, the determinants of political participation of private enterprises are studied. We find (1) entrepreneurs who are older or from larger older enterprises have a higher probability of becoming members of the People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultati...

The proceeding of privatization is a tradeoff between short-term equality and long-term efficiency. Under the existing structures of enterprise management and government powers, enterprise managers are likely to conspire with government officials to decide the way of ownership transformation and share the benefits from there. The transformation of...

China is not merely growing at double the rate of the European countries during the Industrial Revolution, it is also urbanising at double the speed. Using a unique dataset of rural-to-urban migrants in 15 major Chinese cities, we give preliminary answers to some of the most pressing policy questions: how many migrants are there and what are their...

How globalization affects inequality is subject to heated debate (Fischer 2003:5). Stiglitz (1998) and Hurrell and Woods (2000), among others, argue that globalization leads to increases in inequality because trade increases differentials in returns to education and skills, globalization marginalizes certain groups of people or geographic regions,...

Lacking guidance of general equilibrium (GE) theories in public economics and the corresponding proper mechanisms, China has not surprisingly witnessed an inequality in educational expenditures across regions as well as insufficiency of funds for education in poor areas. It is wrongly thought that what happens is due to the decentralized financing...

China's recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-region income inequality in China. This paper discusses China's globalization process and estimates an income generating function, incorporating trade and FDI va...

Post-reform economic policies in China have been biased toward urban residents and have contributed to the increasing urban-rural inequality. Analysis of the provincial panel data during 1987-2001 shows that urbanization significantly narrowed the urban-rural inequality. We also find that interprovincial migration, economic opening, and governmenta...

This paper argues that the conventional approach of data averaging is problematic for exploring the growth–inequality nexus. It introduces the polynomial inverse lag (PIL) framework so that the impacts of inequality on investment, education, and ultimately on growth can be measured at precisely defined time lags. Combining PIL with simultaneous sys...

Based on provincial panel data, we tested the effects of openness, denationalization, fiscal reform, and their interactions on Chinese regional economic growth. We found the following: (1) Openness, especially the growth of foreign-direct-investment/gross-domestic-product ratio, has been important in enhancing China’s growth since the mid-1980s, wh...

This paper explores the causes of industrial agglomeration in China using the provincial panel data during 1987-2001, focusing on the effects of economic opening. The determinants of industrial agglomeration are tested by controlling three types of factors, those of economic policies, economic geography and new economic geography, respectively. In...

This paper has explored the causes of duplicative industries and interregional economic segmentation with increasing returns. In a transitional economy, the better-developed region has comparative advantage in high-tech industries and higher speed of technological progress, and consequently a higher position and a larger share in interregional barg...

The geographic nature and openness of China since 1990s make it a feasible application of the Core-Periphery (CP) model, which has hardly explained urban systems in existing studies. Using Chinese city- level data from 1990 to 2006, this paper estimates the impact of spatial interactions in China's urban system on urban economic growth. Our results...

This chapter systematically presents the successes and the failures of Chinese-style fed- eralism. Current Chinese federalism combines political centralization with an economic decentralization that provides local governments with strong incentives to develop their own local economies. As a result, this federalism has created market segmentation, w...

In the past 30 years of reform and opening up, China has enjoyed unprecedented eco- nomic growth in the context of globaliza- tion, industrialization, and urbanization. When China became fully integrated into the global economy, this populous country joined the global production system, bring- ing not only vast, cheap, and high-quality labor but al...

This paper argues that the conventional approach of data averaging is problematic for exploring the growth-inequality nexus. It introduces the polynomial inverse lag (PIL) framework so that the impacts of inequality on investment, education, and ultimately on growth can be measured at precisely defined time lags. Combining PIL with simultaneous sys...

Party membership and social networks, as two forms of nonmarket power, have significant effects on personal income. Do the effects vary across different ownership sectors (suoyouzhi xingzhi)? Using a nationally representative survey of urban households (China Household Income Project surveys in 1995 and 2002), we find that (1) party membership can...