Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People’s Republic of China?
Wan, Guanghua; Zhang, Xun | July 2015
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.
Citation
Wan, Guanghua; Zhang, Xun. 2015. Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People’s Republic of China?. © Asian Development Bank Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/11540/9658.Keywords
Alleviating Poverty
Anti-Poverty
Extreme Poverty
Fight Against Poverty
Global Poverty
Health Aspects Of Poverty
Indicators Of Poverty
Participatory Poverty Assessment
Poverty Eradication
Poverty Analysis
Poverty In Developing Countries
Poverty Reduction Efforts
Urban Poverty
Development projects
Physical infrastructure
Soft infrastructure
Infrastructure finance
Infrastructure bonds
Transport infrastructure
Roads
Highways
Railways
Ports
Airports
Pipelines
Water supply
Power production
Power transmission
Power distribution
Telecommunications
Infrastructure connectivity
Cross border connectivity
Development Indicators
Environmental Indicators
Economic Indicators
Educational Indicators
Demographic Indicators
Health Indicators
Disadvantaged Groups
Low Income Groups
Socially Disadvantaged Children
Rural Conditions
Rural Development
Social Conditions
Urban Development
Urban Sociology
Poor
Economic forecasting
Health expectancy
Social groups
Political participation
Distribution of income
Inequality of income
Developing countries
Rural community development
Mass society
Social change
Social policy
Social stability
Population
Sustainable development
Peasantry
Urban policy
Urban renewal
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Citable URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11540/9658Metadata
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