https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22804/w22804.pdf

Trade, Pollution and Mortality in China

This paper maps the distribution of total direct and embodied emissions of greenhouse gases by households in the UK and goes on to analyse their main drivers. Previous research has studied the distribution of direct emissions by households, notably from domestic fuel and electricity, but this is the first to cover the indirect emissions embodied in the consumption of food, consumer goods and services, including imports. To study total emissions by British households we link an input-output model of the UK economy to the UK Expenditure and Food Survey. Results are presented as descriptive statistics followed by regression analysis. All categories of per capita emission rise with income which is the main driver. Two other variables are always significant: household composition, partly reflecting economies of scale in consumption and emissions in larger households, and employment status. This ‘standard’ model explains 35% of variation in total emissions, reflecting further variation within income groups and household types. We also compute the distribution of emissions derived from the consumption of welfare state services: here, lower income and pensioner households ‘emit’ more due to their greater use of these services. To take further account of the social implications of these findings, we first estimate emissions per £ of income. This shows a reverse slope with emissions per £ rising as one descends the income scale. The decline with income is especially acute for domestic energy, housing and food emissions, ‘necessary’ expenditures with a lower income elasticity of demand. Next, we move away from per capita emissions by assuming children under 14 emit half that of adults, which reduces disparities between household types. To implement personal carbon allowances, further research will be needed into the carbon allowances of children and single person households. Current government policies to raise carbon prices mainly in domestic energy are found to be especially regressive, but tracking total carbon consumption within a country would require radical changes in monitoring carbon flows at national borders. In the meantime, poorly targeted policies to compensate ‘fuel poor’ families should give way to more radical ‘eco-social’ policies, such as house retrofitting, coupled with ‘social’ tariffs for domestic energy.

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The distribution of total greenhouse gas emissions by households in the UK, and some implications for social policy

\n This paper studies the effect of India's rural public works program on rural-to-urban migration and urban labor markets. We find that seasonal migration from rural districts that implemented the program decreased relative to those that were selected to, but did not implement it. We use a gravity model and find that real wages rose faster in cities with higher predicted migration from program districts. Since most seasonal migrants work outside of their district, urban wage increases were not limited to program districts, and may have attracted migrants from nonprogram districts. Difference-in-differences may hence be biased. Structural estimates indeed suggest that migration decreased by 22% in program districts, but also increased by 5% in nonprogram districts. As a result, urban wages increased by only 0.5%, against 4.1% if the program had been implemented in all selected districts.

/pdf/short-term-migration-rural-public-works-and-urban-labor-5a0riztulr.pdf

Short-term migration, rural public works and urban labor markets : evidence from India

Tyrene White, China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 297 pp.This fascinating book recounts the evolution of population control policies applied from the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949 up to the present. The author bases her research on the political origins of birth control as well as its crucial role in China's quest for modernity. In contrast with the wealth of existing literature on the subject, White's main emphasis is not on the sociological, demographic,(1) or anthropological(2) aspects, but on the political dimension: how and why was the Communist Party of China (CPC) led to impose birth control? To what extent was it applied and what were the results? And why does the Party persist in maintaining it?White draws on a wealth of diverse data from the political literature relating to internal reforms (principally rural economic reforms), and to the mass campaigns from the beginning of the 1950s to the end of the 1990s. She brings together numerous local regulations, official circulars, and articles drawn from the Chinese press as well as from journals specialising in questions relating to family planning. Moreover, field notes and observation, and interviews with political leaders, local cadres, and individual citizens provide a finely shaded picture of the application of birth control. Drawing on extracts from interviews and specific cases recounted throughout the book, White draws a picture of the tensions and contradictions of the campaigns launched in the country and the city to restrict the number of births.In the first and second chapters, White explains the situation in which the Chinese government found itself when it decided to impose population control. She thus brings out the economic imperative that gave rise to this family planning policy: the Communist Party feared that population growth would hinder or slow the economic reforms underway. The necessity of reducing population growth was asserted as the primary condition for reaching and maintaining a satisfactory rate of economic growth. The single child policy launched at the end of the 1970s encouraged late marriage, the spacing out of children (if permission for a second child was given), and the general limitation of one child per couple. The difficulty of implementing birth control was particularly acute in the countryside, where local cadres were mobilised to change the family demographic (Chapter 4). White makes a shrewd presentation of the dilemmas encountered by government officials, who were entrusted with managing birth control, while also being called upon to serve as exemplary models of compliance with the regulations involved. Specific cases illustrate the lack of a clear boundary between society and the state. White then observes the shortcomings in the Chinese system of bureaucracy, which perceives two forms of production that must be rationed: cereals and births (Chapter 5).Rich studies and analyses of mass sterilisation campaigns are then presented (Chapter 6). The human cost of forced sterilisation and abortion is revealed in detail: White's argumentation is full of statistics covering the whole country, enriched by interviews carried out mainly in the provinces of Anhui and Hebei. …

China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic [Book Review]

Contemporary policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will have distributive consequences and thus implications for the scope and remit of social policy. This paper studies current carbon mitigation policies and their distributive impacts. It considers a range of current and proposed social programmes to ameliorate these impacts, before proposing alternatives. This argument is pursued in two parts according to whether emissions are conceived and accounted within a production or a consumption framework. The first part works within the Kyoto policy framework, critiques the present suite of policies and suggests alternative policy scenarios that may better marry together the goals of carbon reduction and social equity. The second half justifies and operationalises a broader focus on all GHGs emitted by British consumers, whether directly or embodied in goods and services. It argues that to target these will require going beyond the current policy paradigm to develop more radical policies to modify preferences and behaviour, and to constrain total consumption demand. It then speculates on ways that new social policy programmes might combine the pursuit of these goals together with social equity.

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Carbon Mitigation Policies, Distributional Dilemmas and Social Policies

A classic literature argues that improvements in agricultural productivity result in higher non-agricultural output, particularly at low levels of development. The proposed mechanisms for these ‘forward linkages’ vary, but centre on either increases in the supply of factors, especially labour and capital, or demand externalities in product markets. Regardless of the mechanism, the empirical evidence for substantial forward linkages from agriculture is limited. In this paper, I show that in reform-era China there were substantial forward linkages. I exploit the fact that China’s 1978-84 agricultural reforms were more beneficial to farmers with land suited to cash crops to provide plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural productivity. Then, using a newly digitised panel of economic data for 561 counties, I trace the growth of agricultural and non-agricultural output over forty years. Higher agricultural output was associated with significantly faster subsequent growth in non-agricultural output. I estimate 15 and 25 year elasticities of 1.2 and 0.8. I am able to identify these linkages because China is subject to substantial geographic capital and labour market frictions. These frictions limit the equalisation of prices across space and keep local shocks local. I use the predictions of a simple two sector model, which nests the possibility of linkages through demand externalities and the supply of capital or labour, to provide evidence that the linkages identified were primarily due to higher agricultural surpluses increasing the supply of capital to local firms.

/pdf/the-agricultural-roots-of-industrial-development-forward-3v57coavhv.pdf

The agricultural roots of industrial development: 'forward linkages' in reform era China

This paper asks whether the policies and programmes enacted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will compete with other goals of public policy, in particular social policy goals. The Climate Change Act 2008 has set the UK some of the most demanding targets in the world: to reduce GHG emissions (compared with 1990) by at least 80% by 2050 and by at least 34% by 2020 – just nine years away. A wide array of climate change mitigation policies (CCMPs) have been put in place to bring this about. Will these compete fiscally with the large public expenditures on the welfare state? We address this question by surveying and costing all UK government policies that have a climate change mitigation objective and which are expressed through taxation, government expenditures and government-mandated expenditures by energy suppliers and other businesses and which are directed toward the household sector. Our conclusion is that expenditures on CCMPs are tiny – around one quarter of one per cent of GDP - and will not rise significantly. Within this the share of direct spending by government will fall and that obligated on utility companies will rise. Green taxes are also planned to fall as a share of GDP. There is no evidence here of fiscal competition between the welfare state and the environmental state. However, the use of mandated electricity and gas markets will impose rising costs on the household sector, which will bear more heavily on lower income households and will increase ‘fuel poverty’. Thus demands on traditional social policies are likely to rise. More radical policy reforms will be needed to integrate climate change and social policy goals.

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Fiscal costs of climate mitigation programmes in the UK: A challenge for social policy?

In China, many fewer girls are born than would be expected given natural birth rates. This imbalance has worsened dramatically over the last 40 years. The roughly contemporaneous fall in fertility per woman is often mooted as a source of this apparent increased demand for sex selection: fewer births make it harder to have a son by chance. Despite this, causal evidence is limited. This paper exploits geographic variation in changes in fertility, arising as a consequence of Chinas agricultural reforms (1978-84), to provide this evidence. Specifically, I show that households living in counties that benefitted more from the reforms, increased their fertility relative to households elsewhere. I then show that these households are also less likely to engage in sex selection. These changes appear to have been due to higher local incomes interacting with the enforcement of the One Child Policy. The timing of the changes in fertility and sex selection are informative: while fertility increased almost immediately, the decline in sex selection only emerged from the mid 1980s contemporaneous with the widespread availability of ultrasound. These results suggest that the dramatic decline in fertility in 1970s China, as well as the smaller decline due to the One Child Policy in the 1980s, may have had an important role in fuelling the demand for sex selection.

Samuel Marden

Papers

The agricultural roots of industrial development: 'forward linkages' in reform era China

Fiscal costs of climate mitigation programmes in the UK: A challenge for social policy?

Family Size and the Demand for Sex Selection: Evidence From China