Inequality in Vietnamese Urban-Rural Living Standards, 1993-2006 Using data from five waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, we find evidence of significant urban-rural expenditure inequality. Urban-rural inequality in Vietnam increased dramatically from 1993 to 1998, and peaked in 2002 before reducing slightly in 2004, and significantly in 2006. The urban-rural gap also monoton...

The role of foreign direct investment (FDI) continues to be debated and tested in the literature on international economics and development economics. This paper extends the previous empirical studies on the issue by developing a new framework and providing some evidence from panel data of China. We first identify possible channels through which FDI may affect (positively or negatively) the Chi...

During Vietnam’s two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly—macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. We investigate whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact making a tradeoff between q...

This paper marks the first attempt at examining the growth performance across Indian states for the 2000s, a period also marked by the global financial crisis. We report four key findings. First, consistent with the fact that the 2000s was the best ever decade for Indian macroeconomic performance, growth increased across almost all major states in 2001–09 compared to 1993–2001. Second, neverthe...

According to most criteria, North Korea would be classified as a failing state. More often than not the country’s destiny has been predicted as collapse, chaos, and in the end, absorption by South Korea. However, so far the Kim Jong-il regime proved viable and cultivated the art to survive within a globalizing world without opening up. More recently, North Korean authorities appeared to revive ...

Concentrating on the period of quantitative easing in Japan, this paper reexamines the correlation between the asymmetry of sectoral relative-price changes and the aggregate inflation rate. This correlation is widely interpreted as evidence that short-run inflation is determined by supply-side factors; however, we study whether, in addition to the inflation rate, monetary environment and aggreg...

A considerable body of economic literature shows the adverse economic impacts of oil-price shocks for the developed economies. However, there has been a lack of empirical study of this kind on China and other developing countries. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering how and to what extent oil-price shocks impact China’s economy, emphasizing on the price transmission mechanisms. To...

This paper examines the political influence on government bank lending decisions using the prefecture level panel data on Japan’s government loans from 1975 to 1992. I find that prefectures that were represented by more influential members of the ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), tended to receive more government loans. I also find that the amount of government loans tended to i...

This article examines the involvement pattern in global value chains (GVCs) with its policy implication in Vietnam, in comparison with those of the other Asian countries, by using the OECD value-added-trade data. The study first identified the “smile curve” as the average pattern of the Asian GVCs development paths in total manufactures, in which the domestic value share to exports declines at ...

The issue of the interaction between trade and labor mobility has become a major topic in the context of economic integration and trade liberalization. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the issue of international labor mobility from the standpoint of new developments in trade theory, by asking the following question: does trade liberalization result in the substitution or complem...