The urban-rural divide

Understanding the Rural – Urban Digital Divide

This paper explains the current ‘digital divide’ in internet use between rural and urban areas using a Logit adoption model with data collected from the August 2000 Current Population Survey. A non-linear decomposition shows that rural – urban household attribute differences account for 66 percent of the digital divide, while place based differences account for the remaining 34 percent of the d...

The Political Economy of China’s Rural- Urban Divide

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...

Digital Divide between Urban and Rural Regions in China

This research paper evaluates the development relationship between the adoption rate of Information and Communications Technologies (the Internet, mobile phone, pager, personal computer, and telephone) and per capita income gap between the urban and rural areas in China, mainly between 1985 and 2006. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients suggest there has been a strong correlation in the devel...

Bridging the Rural Digital Divide

The Rural-urban Divide and the Evolution of Political Economy in China