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This chapter provides an empirical assessment of the effects of infrastructure provision on structural change and aggregate productivity using industrylevel data for a set of developed and developing countries over 1995–2010. A distinctive feature of the empirical strategy followed is that it allows the measurement of the resource reallocation directly attributable to infrastructure provision. To achieve this, a two-level top-down decomposition of aggregate productivity that combines and extends several strands of the literature is proposed. The empirical application reveals significant production losses attributable to misallocation of inputs across firms, especially among African countries. Also, the results show that infrastructure provision has stimulated aggregate total factor productivity growth through both within and between industry productivity gains.

Employment law reform enforced in Estonia in mid-2009 provides a good opportunity to examine the outcomes of employment protection legislation (EPL). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of the reduction in EPL on labour reallocation.

The author exploits the micro-data of the Labour Force Survey to estimate the probabilities of one-year worker flows with probit models, and uses a difference in differences (DID) approach to identify the effects of the EPL reform.

The author finds that the reduction in EPL seems to have increased the probability of transitions out of employment. At the same time, she does not find any significant effect of this reform on the probability of flows into employment. The evaluation also gives evidence of a lowered probability of job-to-job transitions resulting from the reduction in EPL.

In this paper, the DID estimation is conducted by using Lithuanians as the control group for Estonians. However, it should be noted that this approach assumes strong similarities between these countries in order to obtain reliable estimates.

The findings of this paper raise the possibility that the reduction in EPL alone may not have been sufficient for achieving a better reallocation of labour and this is important to consider in the context of further developments in other labour market institutions.

In the process of making agricultural production decisions in rural households, severe weather conditions, either extreme cold or heat, may squeeze the labor input in the agricultural sector, leading to a reallocation of labor between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, reveal the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

This study utilizes data from Chinese meteorological stations and two waves of China Household Income Project to examine the impact and behavioral mechanism of extreme temperatures on rural labor reallocation.

(1) Extremely high and low temperatures had led to a reallocation of labor force from agricultural activities to non-farm employment, with a more pronounced effect from extreme high temperature events. (2) Extreme temperatures influence famers’ decision in abandoning farmland and reducing investment in agricultural machinery, thus creating an interconnected impact on labor mobility. (3) The reallocation effect of rural labor induced by extreme temperatures is particularly evident for males, persons that perceives economic hardship or labor in economically active areas.

By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, and reveals the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the predictability of firm level data for determining macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment.

This study uses quarterly GDP and unemployment data manually collected from the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI). Accounting numbers are also collected from the Tehran Stock Exchange library for the 2004-2015 period. Dispersion of earnings growth provides related data about labour reallocation, unemployment change and finally aggregate output. To summarize, this study attempts to examine the effect of these variables using classical and Bayesian approaches.

At a firm level, our results suggest that sectoral shift in previous years is likely to increase labour reallocation in subsequent years. At the macro level, the results reveal that dispersion of earnings growth and labour reallocation has a negative and positive impact on unemployment changes, respectively. However, the study suggests no significant relationship between stock return and unemployment changes. Consequently, we determine that the real estimates of macroeconomic indicators have predictive power because nominal estimates are not statistically associated with firm-level details. Finally, the results obtained from classical and Bayesian approaches suggest similar findings, thus confirming the robustness of our conclusions. Note that, based on Bayesian approach, the nominal reallocation has predictive power in unemployment rate.

The study is the first conducted in a developing country and the results provide important insight into current line of accounting literature.

Poverty alleviation has been a major theme of China's modernization process since the founding of New China. This paper points out that China's poverty alleviation process presents three stylized facts: “Miraculous” achievements of poverty alleviation have been made on a global scale; the poverty alleviation achievements mainly occurred in the high growth stage after reform and opening up; the poverty alleviation process is accompanied by the structural transformation of the urban–rural dual economy.

Therefore, a logically consistent analytical framework should form among the structural transformation of the dual economy, economic growth and the achievements in poverty alleviation. In logical deduction, the structural transformation of the dual economy affects rural poverty alleviation through the effects of labor reallocation, agricultural productivity improvement, demographic change and fiscal resource allocation.

The first two refer to economic growth, and the latter two are alleviation policies. The combination of economic growth and poverty alleviation policies is the main cause for poverty alleviation performance. China's empirical evidence can support the four effects by which the structural transformation of the dual economy affects poverty alleviation.

China's socialist system and its economic system transformation after reform and opening up provide an institutional basis for the effects to come into play. After 2020, China's poverty alleviation strategies will enter the “second-half” phase, namely, the phase of solving the problems of relative poverty in urban and rural areas by adopting conventional methods and establishing long-term mechanisms. This requires the facilitation of the reconnection between poverty alleviation strategies and the structural transformation of the dual economy in terms of development ideas and policy directions.

The purpose of this paper is to review the process of rural labor reallocation and unfolds its growth effect through sufficiently supplying human resources, preventing diminishing return to capital, and increasing labor productivity.

The author surveys literature and statistics related to the subject to comprehensively picture the 40-year course of the shift and reallocation of agricultural surplus labor.

In the past 40 years, reforms in relevant areas have eliminated institutional barriers deterring labor mobility and allowed agricultural laborers to exit from low-productivity farming employment, migrate beyond rural-urban boundary and across regions, sectors, and ownerships, and enter higher productivity employment in non-agricultural sectors. As a result, resources allocative efficiency has been substantially improved, contributing a significant part to labor productivity growth and thus economic growth of the Chinese economy as a whole.

To sustain this source of economic growth as far as China completes its transition from upper-middle income status to high-income status, deepening reforms is urgently needed. The author provides policy suggestions for further reform.

This paper enhances people’s understanding of the Chinese economic reform and its nature of efficiency and inclusion.

Malaysia is one of the high performing economies (HPE) in Southeast Asia. It had experienced strong growth and development for the period between 1957 and 1995. Socioeconomic planning, structural and trade adjustments, and adoption of pragmatic policies that promoted agriculture as well as the manufacturing sub‐sector resulted in higher productivities, incomes and standards of living. Policymakers were also successful in adopting policies that mitigated poverty and, to a lesser extent, decreased income inequality.

The last two decades have been characterised by a rise in income and wage inequality in a wide range of countries, including European transition countries. The rise in globalisation is one major factor explaining this increasing wage inequality. International trade and FDI have increased significantly since the beginning of transition and the purpose of this paper is to focus on whether FDI plays an important role in explaining the pattern of wage inequality in selected transition countries.

A cross-country empirical investigation has been conducted using two alternative measures of wage inequality: the Gini coefficient and the Theil index. Several model specifications and estimation strategies have been employed to obtain consistent estimates and to check for the robustness of the results.

The results indicate that a rising share of inward FDI in gross domestic product (GDP) increased wage inequality in transition economies, though its overall effect was relatively small. Considering the long run, there is no clear evidence of a concave relationship between FDI and wage inequality, which may be a consequence of the relatively low levels of FDI in many transition countries.

Inwards FDI has made a small contribution to increasing wage inequality in European transition economies. However, its overall beneficial effects on labour markets in these countries suggest that rather than restricting FDI governments should target increasing the supply of skilled labour.

This new empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an increased inward FDI stock as a share of GDP increases wage inequality in transition economies, however, this relationship is a complex one. Differences in average wages, wage differentials, employment shares of skilled workers and relative size of the foreign-owned sector are all likely to be important for the behaviour of wage inequality.