Numerous policy studies have argued that conditions have prevailed in China since the open door economic reforms of the late 1970s that have encouraged rapid growth at the expense of regional income inequality across the provinces of China. In this paper we use recently developed nonstationary panel techniques to provide empirical support for the fact that the long run tendency since the reforms has been for provincial-level incomes to continue to diverge. More importantly, we show that this divergence cannot be attributed to the presence of separate, regional convergence clubs divided among common geographic subgroupings such as the coastal versus interior provinces. Furthermore, we also show that the divergence cannot be attributed to differences in the degree of preferential open-door policies. Rather, we find that the divergence is pervasive both nationally and within these various regional and political subgroupings. We argue that these results point to other causes for regional income divergence, and they also carry potentially important implications for other regions of the world.--
The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.Despite strong economic growth, a "U"-curve unemployment phenomenon in Mauritius can be observed. Unemployment plunged from 21 percent to less than 4 percent between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, but this trend was reversed and the rate increased to 10 percent by end-2002. This paper provides an analytical framework to explain this development. The growth of higher-skilled sectors coupled with rigidities in the labor market seem to account for the observed unemployment behavior. Policy makers can improve employment prospects by not only investing in education to reduce skills mismatch but also by reforming the pay-setting institutions. JEL Classification Numbers: J20, J64, E23, O33
The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMP policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.This study uses bivariate extremal dependence measures, based on the number of equity return co-exceedances in two markets, to quantify both negative and positive equity returns contagion in mature and emerging equity markets during the past decade. The results indicate (a) higher contagion for negative returns than for positive returns; (b) a secular increase in contagion in Latin America not matched in other regions; (c) global increases in contagion following the 1998 financial crises; and (d) that the use of simple correlations as a proxy for contagion could be misleading, as the former exhibit low correlation with extremal dependence measures of contagion.
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