[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/adbiwp/0540.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People’s Republic of China?

Author

Listed:
  • Wan, Guanghua

    (Asian Development Bank Institute)

  • Zhang, Xun

    (Asian Development Bank Institute)

Abstract
The importance of infrastructure in economic development has been increasingly recognized by governments, development institutions, and the research community. Despite a sizable literature on its efficiency and growth effects, the distributive impacts of infrastructure have been largely overlooked, with a few recent exceptions. This is regrettable, particularly given the overwhelming concern about inequality and inclusive growth all over the world. This paper will: (i) demonstrate the deficiency of conventional approaches to modelling inequality; (ii) extend the Mincer earnings function so that both growth and distributive effects of infrastructure can be evaluated; and (iii) fit the extended model to a large sample of individual-level data from rural People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the period of 1989–2011, providing estimates of growth and the distributive impacts of specific physical infrastructures—telephone, tap water and electricity. All these infrastructures are found to promote rural income growth, helping narrow the rural–urban gap, which is the dominant component of the PRC’s overall inequality. Further, the poor are found to gain more than the rich, implying benign distributive effects of these infrastructures. In addition, males, the more experienced, the better educated, and to some extent the married benefited more than their counterparts, especially from telephones. Finally, some of these subpopulation effects have become more significant in recent years and are larger in central PRC, possibly because infrastructure helps open up more opportunities for those with better education or more experience. The empirical results are robust to different definitions of the experience variable, consideration of the mortality selection bias, reconstruction of the telephone data, and possible reverse causality.

Suggested Citation

  • Wan, Guanghua & Zhang, Xun, 2015. "Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People’s Republic of China?," ADBI Working Papers 540, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:adbiwp:0540
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/167390/adbi-wp540.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexandru Pavel & Bogdan Moldovan & Bogdana Neamtu & Cristina Hintea, 2018. "Are Investments in Basic Infrastructure the Magic Wand to Boost the Local Economy of Rural Communities from Romania?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(10), pages 1-32, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    infrastructure gains; rural PRC; physical infrastructure;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • H54 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Infrastructures

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:adbiwp:0540. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ADB Institute (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/adbinjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.