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...

Asian economic regionalism has emerged from a bottom-up process, driven by market forces in the absence of a grand plan for regional integration. While the financial crisis of 1997–98 triggered new regional cooperation initiatives, more recently several Asian political leaders have formulated proposals for the creation of a regional economic community, suggesting the possible start of a top-dow...

Developing countries today face the paradoxical dual burden of malnutrition and obesity. It has been hypothesized that early childhood malnutrition leads to a higher risk of adult obesity, though evidence is mixed. I study the health outcomes and health behaviors of adult men and women who were born during the 1959-61 China Famine. I find that women who as infants were exposed to famine have on...

Confronted by the current global economic crisis, Taipei,China’s economy has suffered much like its neighbors. However, Taipei,China is different from other East Asia economies in several aspects. First, Taipei,China’s industrial organization is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), unlike the chaebols of the Republic of Korea or the Japanese Kabushiki-gaish. Second, Taipei,Ch...

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 ...

Abstract Introduction We assessed whether expert mentoring improved the rate of uptake robotic surgical skill and general advanced psychomotor ability (PMA), specific video-game experience (VGE) had any impact on skill. Method Twenty robotically naive medical students were blinded randomised to two cohorts; control (CC) intervention (IC). Each student's initial performance a variety da Vinci Sk...