Reducing Carbon Footprint Inequality of Household Consumption in Rural Areas:Analysis from Five Representative Provinces in China

Household consumption carbon footprint and inequality reductions are vital for a sustainable society, especially for rural areas. This study, focusing on rural China, one of the fastest growing economies with a massive population, explored the carbon footprint and inequality of household consumption using the latest micro household survey data of 2018 linked to environmental extended input–-output analysis. The results show that in 2018 in rural China, the average household carbon footprint is 2.46 tons CO2-eq per capita, which is around one-third of China’s average footprint, indicating the large potential for further growth. Housing (45.32%), transportation (20.45%), and food (19.62%) are the dominant contributors to the carbon footprint. Meanwhile, great inequality, with a Gini coefficient of 0.488, among rural households is observed, which is largely due to differences in type of house built or purchased (explaining 24.44% of the variation), heating (18.10%), car purchase (12.44%), and petrol consumption (12.44%). Provinces, average education, and nonfarm income are among the important factors influencing the inequality. In the process of urbanization and rural revitalization, there is a high possibility that the household carbon footprint continues to increase, maintaining high levels of inequality. The current energy transition toward less carbon-intensive fuels in rural China is likely to dampen the growth rates of carbon footprints and potentially decrease inequality. Carbon intensity decrease could significantly reduce carbon footprints, but increase inequality. More comprehensive measures to reduce carbon footprint and inequality are needed, including transitioning to clean energy, poverty alleviation, reduction of income inequality, and better health care coverage

From General Discrimination to Segmented Inequality: Migration and Inequality in Urban China

Internal migration in China during the last three decades, the largest in human history, offers a rare opportunity to understand inequalities in the making. Using data spanning 10 years from China’s largest metropolis, Shanghai, this study assesses how enduring state institutions interplay with the spread of market forces to shape income inequality between migrants and native urban workers. Though the wages of both Chinese migrants and urban workers rose considerably, economic restructuring during the decade under study resulted in diminished privileges for urbanites and subsequently increased collision between migrants and urban workers in the private sectors. These shifts, rather than substantially reducing inequality, have led to an evolving form of inequality, from an initial general blatant discrimination against migrants across the board, to a new and more subtle form of inequality characterized by substantial segmented discrimination against migrants within economic sectors, with the degree of inequality varying from sector to sector. We discuss how this changing inequality reflects complementary rather than competing roles of the state and market institutions in inequality creation and maintenance

Economic inequality and marriage formation

My dissertation primarily investigates the causal impact of economic inequality on marriage formation. I demonstrate how economic inequality among men affects an individual woman’s propensity to get married in both the U.S. and China. Based on the framework of Loughran (2002) and Gould and Paserman (2003), I identify the causal impact of male wage inequality on the marriage propensity among women in the U.S. using the 1990 and 2000 Censuses as well as the 2007 American Community Survey. I address the endogeneity and reverse causality problems by applying skill-biased technological shock as an instrument for the wage gap between high and low educated men following the example of Mocan and Unel (2011). I discover that a low educated woman’s marriage propensity becomes lower but a high educated woman’s marriage propensity becomes higher when there is an increase in the wage ratio between high and low educated men. Additionally, I examine whether in China the income inequality among men affects female marital decision making by utilizing the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the Gini coefficient of male income is associated with an increase in the probability of being “ever married” by 5.8 percentage points for urban women and by 6.9 percentage points for rural women aged 20 to 34 from 1989 to 2009

Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality:

This book attempts to get a true global overview of trends in urban inequality and residential socio-economic segregation in a large number of cities all over the world. It investigates the link between income inequality and socio-economic residential segregation in 24 large urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. In many ways the book is a sequel to the earlier book “Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities” which focussed solely on trends in Europe. Although that book was very well received, readers also asked whether trends in Europe were representative for what is happening in the rest of the world. This new book is a direct response to that question and aims to be more globally representative. The main outcome of this book is the proposal of a Global Segregation Thesis, which combines ideas of rising levels of inequality, rising levels of socio-economic segregation, and important changes in the social geography of cities. At the time of writing this preface, the world is still grappling with the global outbreak of COVID-19. Now the spread of the virus is slowing down in the Global North, the Global South is hit very hard. In response to the spread of the virus, unprecedented measures were taken, having a huge impact on the world economy. It is widely expected that these measures will lead to a deep economic crisis, which will hit those who are the most vulnerable hardest. Some of the chapters in this book mention the COVID-19 crisis, and it is expected that this crisis will speed up the increase in inequality, both globally and locally, leading to an accelerated growth in socio-economic segregation in cities. This book would not have been possible without the generous contributions from author teams from all over the world. We are very grateful for their generosity and their contributions. Much of the editorial time invested in this book was covered by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n.615159 (ERC Consolidator Grant DEPRIVEDHOODS, Socio-spatial inequality, deprived neighbourhoods and neighbourhood effects); from the Estonian Research Council (PUT PRG306, Infotechnological Mobility Laboratory, RITA-Ränne), and from TU Delft where Tiit Tammaru was a visiting professor in 2018

Essays on China’s Household Saving Rate and Education Policy

This essay contains three essays in applied microeconomics. The first and second paper study the China’s household saving rate and the third studies the economic policy in China. In Volume 119 of the Journal of Political Economy, a paper uses data from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) 2002 and finds that increasingly unbalanced premarital sex ratio raise household saving rate of son-families and the rapid increase in premarital sex ratio can potentially explain about half of China’s household saving rate increasing during 1990-2007. This paper reexamines the competitive saving motive. We first use local sex ratio inferred from 2000 China population census and same dataset CHIP 2002 to find the competitive saving motive only holds for the household in rich counties. We then use data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) to show that competitive holds for the rural sample. The cross-regional evidence indicates that the competitive saving motive exists, but only in the rural area. By estimation and computation, an increase in sex ratio from 1985 to 2015 can explain about 28% of the actual increase of the increase of rural saving rate. The second paper studies the role of income inequality interacting with liquidity constraints in explaining the high household saving rate in China. The predictions implied by a simple lifecycle heterogeneous agent model are consistent with data facts. Using three large nationally representative data sets, China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), and Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP), we find robust evidence that (1) the rich save more; (2) the poor are more likely to face liquidity constraints, and the effect of liquidity constraints on household saving rate is significantly positive; (3) income inequality has a significant positive effect on aggregate household saving rate; and (4) the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory income for poor households is significantly higher than for rich households. Our study provides a policy implication that economic policy of reducing income inequality would lower the aggregate saving rate and thus become a policy of economic transition and growth. The third paper estimates the effect of the "Program of College Admission for Poor Counties" on high school education using data from 86 counties of Gansu province in northwestern China. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the program significantly increases senior high school entrants by 99-224, and enrollments by 317-586 in per 100,000 population in the poor counties in Gansu after the policy started in 2012. Using the alternative measurement of outcomes, we show that it significantly increases entry rate by 1.3-7.6%, and enrollment rate by 1.2-7.3%. The results are robust to alternative model specifications and outcome measurements. Our findings indicate that this admission policy, which is motivated by addressing unequal access to college, effectively improves schooling at the high school level

China Twenty Years After: Substance Use Under Rapid Social Changes

This dissertation discusses how China’s rapid modernization and social transformation over the last twenty years since a series of reforms at the end of 1980s contribute to the changes in substance use behaviors. Specifically, there are three individual empirical chapters in this dissertation, each exploring one dimension of social change and its association with substance use. First, I have demonstrated how substance use can be a protective factor against unemployment over the long term, especially against the background of massive layoffs among former socialist industrial workers and landless peasants during this period. Second, another chapter examines how social mobility (i.e. changes in a person’s social position in society) contributes to substance use. And finally, I have tested the impact of economic and social modernization on substance use, and considered the social disorganization aspects of community change. Using survival analysis, I have found that general drinking protected against unemployment risk for both men and women, while smoking, even heavy smoking, only protected men but penalized women. However, on the other hand, heavy drinking was not a significant factor against unemployment hazards. Possible explanations have been drawn from social capital theory and the social nature of substances. In order to disentangle the class assimilation effect and mobility effect from the overall differential distribution of substance use among classes, diagonal reference modeling has been employed in the second chapter to show that, overall, higher classes smoked and drank more than lower classes in China. While people, especially those who moved upward in the class ladder, tend to assimilate into their destination class’ drinking pattern, there was no assimilation effect for smoking among the upwardly mobile people. Instead, the independent mobility effect contributes to a higher level of smoking, suggesting that adaptive responses emerged during socially mobile events. I conclude that drinking has more socially vested interests for socially mobile people than smoking. Through multilevel modeling with a feature of growth curve analysis, this dissertation also assesses the influence of community-level social changes and modernization on substance use. I have found that there are certain “good” and “bad” dimensions of modernization, even though all dimensions have been growing together in the past twenty years. Economic modernization amplifies the income effect on substance use, making people with higher incomes smoke even more. Meanwhile, social modernization can mitigate the harmful effect of income on both drinking and smoking. With regard to inequality, its negative interaction with individual income also confirms our hypothesis that poor people tend to use substances more than the rich do in an unequal community. Furthermore, the modernization process has also elevated women’s risk of using substances