China

In the past 30 years, China has reached the target of lifting 500 million people out of poverty. The rate of increase in human development indicators has become the... Show More + second fastest in the world, allowing China to enter the ranks of middle-income countries. As the most populous country, accounting for one-fifth of the world's population, its transformation has been unprecedented in human history. Scientific evidence and international experience in the past 10 years have found that early child development (ECD) is key to human development, as it lays the foundation for the rest of life. Early child development includes physical, psychological, emotional, language, behavioral, and social development. Experience in the early years of life will determine healthy development and happiness in the rest of life. Research has found that investment in ECD is the most cost effective strategy to improve human development. In China's demographic transition, the population of children and youth is declining in absolute numbers, and the investment of raising them can increase on a per capita basis. This study has been in the making since 2009. It was prepared during a time when China was charting its course of development under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015). The study began with an agreement between the World Bank and China's National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) for a collaborative study on ECD. Concurrently, China's Ministry of Education invited the World Bank to conduct an overall review of the education sector, in order to provide it with inputs and suggestions as it prepared China's national plan for medium- and long-term education reform and development (2010-2020). In reviewing achievements and challenges in the education sector, the Bank found that there was much room for expanding and improving preprimary education for children ages 3-6. The Ministry of Education appreciated the Bank's identification of this need and set ambitious goals for preprimary education in the national education plan. Show Less -

Using a new database on Chinese food standards, this paper estimates the impact of volunta-ry and mandatory standards on its agricultural and food exports. The dataset... Show More + covers seven Chinese products from 1992 to 2008. The findings here indicate that standards have a posi-tive effect on China's export performance. Standards signal to customers that products meet certain quality measures and promote information exchange. The benefits of increased ex-ports outweigh compliance costs. Our results also show that theses positive effects are larger when the standards are consistent with international norms. Show Less -

This report stats that income gaps among countries are largely explained by differences in productivity. By raising the capital/labor ratio and rapidly assimilating... Show More + technologies across a wide range of activities, China has increased factor productivity manifold since 1980 and joined the ranks of middle income countries. With the launch of the 12th FYP, China has set its sights on becoming a high income country by 2030 through a strategy combining high levels of investment with rapid advances in technology comparable to that of Japan from the 1960s through the 1970s, and Korea’s from the 1980s through the end of the century. The report concludes that the best bet is an innovation system anchored to and drawing its energy from a competitive national economy. Technological progress and the flourishing of innovation in China will be the function of a competitive, globally networked ecosystem constructed in two stages during 2011- 2030. Government technology cum competition policies will provide impetus in the first stage, but success will hinge on the quality of the workforce, the initiative and policies of firms, the emergence of supporting services. Show Less -

The issue of measuring product variety has received relatively little attention due to its inherent difficulty. In the language of index numbers, an expansion in the... Show More + range of inputs or outputs is a 'new goods' problem: a good that is newly available will have an observed price and quantity, but no corresponding price or quantity the year before. The availability of this new good will yield a welfare gain to consumers, as well as a productivity gain to firms buying the new input. In this paper we show how product variety can be measured in the case of a CES aggregator function. This paper is organized as: after reviewing the literature on the 'new goods' problem in section two, then discuss how to measure export variety in section three. In sections four and five discuss the empirical applications to export variety growth in Mexico and China. Regression results relating trade liberalization to industry export variety are presented in section six, and conclusions are given in section seven. Show Less -

Neuroscience and longitudinal studies of early childhood development and education (ECDE) found that prenatal care and experiences from birth to the first six years... Show More + (0-6), affect physical and brain development of children, and thereby the cognitive and socio-emotional development in subsequent stages of their lives. Lack of access to nutrition and health care, insufficient stimulating human interaction, and non-enrollment in pre-primary education are associated with lower educational attainment and achievement, which, in turn, reduce life-time earnings and potentially contribute to disruptive behavior to society. Investing in ECDE yields the highest economic returns because early learning and formation of good habits and social skills are far more productive than later, remedial education and training. The internal rates of return of rigorously evaluated ECDE programs range from 7 percent to 18 percent, which are higher than the rates of return to financial capital. Investments in ECDE are one of the most cost-effective strategies to break the inter-generational transmission of poverty, and to improve productivity and social cohesion in the long run. The report considers it highly desirable to universalize ECDE for the 0-6 age group in the long run because it equalizes opportunities and enhances the country's future competitiveness. But the report focuses on the medium term and advocates a two-pronged, pro-poor approach in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015). Show Less -

China opened its economy and introduced economic reforms in 1978 that over the next three decades produced unprecedented economic growth sharply reducing household poverty,... Show More + but also increasing spatial income inequality with higher median incomes in urban areas and the coastal region. This paper traces China's growth story and the contributing role of education and training. It highlights policies behind the development of education and training that have influenced the pattern of rising income inequality. It reviews China's efforts to provide universal basic education of 9 years, its expansion of secondary education and the emphasis on vocational and technical secondary education, and its movement to mass higher education. The paper identifies policies behind this expansion whose implementation contributed to spatial inequalities. These policies include: restrictions on labor mobility through residence permits; a low level of public expenditure on education by international standards, the commercialization of post-basic education to fill the spending gap, the decentralization of fiscal responsibility to local governments for education without sufficient attention to variance in fiscal capacity, and the addition of resources from private education and training that favored cities and highly developed markets. The paper also identifies differences in returns to rural and urban education. Show Less -

China's recent economic growth has expanded industrialization and urbanization, upgraded consumption, increased social mobility, and initiated a shift from an economy... Show More + based on agriculture to one based on industry and services. Still more than half of China's people still live in rural areas where average income per capita is less than a third of the urban average, a gap that is among the largest in the world. Reducing these differences is critical to building a harmonious, inclusive society. This report draws from background research conducted by the advisory committee for state informatization, and attempts to provide an overview of China's rural information and communications technology (ICT) development primarily in the past 15 years. The report first describes the status of China's rural informatization infrastructure. It then reviews existing rural ICT initiatives in China and summarizes them by organizational models. International examples are included to draw lessons from. Finally, the challenges of rural informatization are examined, and policy recommendations identified to address them. Show Less -

In broad terms, the sources of economic growth are well understood but relatively few countries have succeeded in effectively harnessing this knowledge for policy purposes... Show More + so as to sustain high rates of growth over an extended period of time (commission on growth and development 2008; Yusuf 2009). Among the ones that have done so, China stands out. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate averaging almost ten percent between 1978 and 2007 is unmatched. Even more remarkable is the performance of China's two leading industrial regions: the Yangtze River (Changjiang) delta area and the Pearl River delta. Both these regions have averaged growth rates well above eleven percent since 1985. Shanghai, the focus of this study, is the urban axis of the Yangtze River delta's thriving economy. Its future performance and that of a handful of other urban regions will determine China's economic fortunes in the coming decades. Show Less -

There has been increased interest throughout the world in improving transit services through the introduction of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). ITS can be... Show More + defined as a set of technologies intended to improve the quality or efficiency of transit services primarily by providing the appropriate information at the appropriate time in an appropriate form to transit staff and transit customers. The World Bank has participated in the financing of several ITS systems in China. Given the complexity of these projects and their potential for dramatic transformation of transit operating agencies, it is worthwhile to provide some guidance to senior staff from transit systems contemplating ITS projects as well as decision-makers external to the transit operating organizations The World Bank commissioned a series of three papers to assist in this effort. This first paper is a description of the key ITS applications for transit operations and where they are most beneficial. This second paper reviews a number of previous installations and reports on lessons learned, both positive and negative, in the hope of maximizing the effectiveness of technology in improving transit services. The third is a set of Terms of Reference (TOR's) for professional services associated with ITS project management to assist in project implementation these papers focus more on the organizational and planning issues associated with ITS. This guidance is primarily directed to bus transit operators, including those with bus rapid transit (BRT) services. However, the sections on fare collection and traffic signal priority may have some application to streetcar or light rail transit. Vehicle location on such systems is usually accomplished by a signal system used to control switching between tracks. This note serves as an introduction to the topic of ITS for transit. In it, we introduce the various ITS technologies, identify their benefits, and the range of applications where their use is most appropriate. The interaction among technologies in providing information useful to transit system management is also discussed. Of equal importance, we have found that successful implementation of ITS depends not only on the technology but also on the institutional environment in which they are implemented. Since the introduction of technology fundamentally changes the nature of traditional managerial and staff processes, organizations which are able to embrace change and alter their methods of doing business will be more likely to fully benefit from these installations. Accordingly, this paper discusses some of the institutional and organizational factors associated with ITS implementation. From the outset, this note does not advocate for the implementation of specific ITS technologies. Show Less -

In determining whether a country's higher education system should be expanded, it is important for policymakers first to determine the extent to which high private returns... Show More + to post-secondary education are an indication of the scarcity of graduates instead of the high unobserved ability of students who choose to attend post-secondary education. To this end, the paper identifies the returns to schooling in urban China using individual-level variation in educational attainment caused by exogenous city-wide disruptions to education during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. For city-cohorts who experienced greater disruptions, children's educational attainment became less correlated with that of their fathers and more influenced by whether their fathers held administrative positions. The analysis calculates returns to college education using data from the China Urban Labor Survey conducted in five large cities in 2001. The results are consistent with the selection of high-ability students into higher education. The analysis also demonstrates that these results are unlikely to be driven by sample selection bias associated with migration, or by alternative pathways through which the Cultural Revolution could have affected adult productivity. Show Less -