In this research, I investigate the relationship between different types of housing demolition compensation and entrepreneurship, utilizing data from the China Household Finance Survey. Employing economic analysis with a two-way fixed effects model, I find that among households that have experienced demolition, those receiving cash compensation are more likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities compared to those receiving other forms of compensation. This effect operates through a mechanism in which cash compensation alleviates liquidity constraints. The findings hold true for both established and nascent households and are particularly pronounced in urban areas and in the eastern region of the People’s Republic of China. This study contributes to the developmental literature on demolition and entrepreneurship by highlighting the positive aspects and remedial potential of compensation. It offers a detailed examination of compensation types and links liquidity theory to the context of housing demolition.

Urban transportation infrastructure remains underdeveloped in many low- and middle-income countries, while quantitative evidence on urban transport’s impact is limited. We examine the effect of the Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), Indonesia’s first urban railway project, on property values. Using a panel dataset of rents for commercial offices and residential apartments along the MRT line, we apply a difference-in-differences estimation to assess the impact of the MRT opening in a quasi-natural experimental setting. We find a negative and significant impact of the MRT opening on commercial office rents in areas close to MRT stations, while no significant impact is observed on residential apartments. We argue that the negative impact on commercial offices may be driven by oversupply of rental office properties. Our results suggest that property values may not necessarily increase with urban transit development, posing a challenge for practitioners pursuing transit-oriented development and land value capture financing for infrastructure.

We investigate convergence among Indian states between 1981 and 2016 using the distance of any state from the leading state as our key variable. We focus on the role of three major sectors—agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure—in achieving convergence. Prima facie, we do not find any firm evidence of convergence in our dataset. However, unit root tests both at the state level and in panel data confirm convergence. Considering the three main sectors strengthens our findings, indicating that an increase in the relative income gap with the leading state is associated with a decrease in the Distance variable. This is consistent with the notion of convergence. Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Infrastructure variables demonstrate statistically significant relationships with distance, and each has its own individual impact, in terms of magnitude and direction, on convergence. Additionally, we find that the overall effect of each of these three major variables is actually dependent on the distance. Our results remain robust to alternative estimation methods.

This paper studies the impact of Thailand’s One-Million-Baht Village Fund program on easing constraints on business development for households in northern Thailand. The macroscale implementation of the Village Fund program provides sufficient exogenous variation in microcredit per household which, combined with our unique dataset, enables us to construct an instrument to estimate probit models that address endogeneity in borrowing decisions. We find evidence for positive impact on relieving financial constraints on household business expansion but no positive effects on new business startups. Our findings offer policy implications for enhancing the effectiveness of microfinance programs in fostering household business development.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) in safeguarding financial stability among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea—particularly in response to the coronavirus disease pandemic. Despite its intended role as a regional financial safety net, the CMIM has had minimal impact on reducing foreign reserve accumulation and was not activated during the pandemic, raising concerns about its operational viability. Our analysis highlights significant disparities between the region’s ASEAN and non-ASEAN economies, with ASEAN members exhibiting a stronger inclination toward reserve accumulation. While the CMIM may serve as a psychological buffer, its role in mitigating financial instability remains limited. These findings underscore the need for a comprehensive reassessment of the CMIM’s structural framework, operational mechanisms, and overall effectiveness in addressing future crises. This study is among the first to provide an empirical evaluation of the performance of the CMIM during a global crisis and presents policy recommendations to enhance regional financial cooperation and crisis responses in Asia.

This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood vaccination on educational and health outcomes. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, we leverage the variation in timing and quality of the Village Midwife Program’s implementation in the 1990s as a source of vaccination access differences. We use the interaction between the timing of midwife presence in communities and the squared inverse-distance from the respondent’s district of birth to the national capital as an exogenous factor influencing whether a child received full basic vaccinations. Our findings indicate that children who received complete basic vaccinations tend to attain more years of schooling, achieve higher math scores, are taller, and have a lower risk of being underweight. We also find evidence suggesting that childhood stunting, wasting, and being underweight, as well as absenteeism and lower cognitive abilities in later life, may be key channels through which incomplete childhood vaccination influences human capital formation.

New developments of existing technologies over time have led to emergent patterns of technology adoption and, accordingly, changed impacts on the economy and society. Focusing on the arrival of mobile internet, this paper identifies significant positive effects of mobile internet on provincial average household income in Viet Nam. The results are identified using a combination of panel fixed effects and instrumental variable approaches. Evidence of impact mechanisms via average household income from wages, firm sizes and employees’ wages, and transportation flows and distances is also presented. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the effect sizes are larger for lower-income quintiles and for rural areas, highlighting the more inclusive impact of the innovation over the last decade. The outcomes from Viet Nam, a lower-middle-income country, can bring further understanding about the extent of the impacts of second-generation mobile for development in particular and information and communication technologies for development in general.

Asia’s development trajectory has important implications for achieving the globally agreed climate goal of limiting global warming to well below [Formula: see text]C. The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change incorporated an ambitious effort to compile and compare thousands of model–scenario combinations from integrated assessment models. This paper explores the evidence within that database to consider low-carbon development pathways for developing economies in Asia and the Pacific. Overall, a comparison of the major models shows that strong consistency in the transformation of the energy sector is required to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. This includes a rapid decline in the share of coal—a mainstay of the power sector in developing Asia—and a substantial rise in renewable energy. The cost of the transition can be relatively low if mitigation policies are efficient, as assumed in the models.

This paper examines whether and how the emissions trading schemes (ETS) pilot program could influence the capital expenditures of firms in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). We use the ETS pilot in the PRC as a quasinatural experiment and obtain a comprehensive dataset of 28,213 firm–year observations, covering 3,557 listed Chinese firms observed annually between 2010 and 2022. We use difference-in-differences regressions to examine the impacts of the ETS pilot on the capital investments of firms. We document that the ETS pilot could motivate firms to increase their capital investments. This finding holds in various robustness and sensitivity checks, including dynamic timing tests, placebo tests, and subsample analyses that exclude outliers. Importantly, we further document that innovative firms increase capital expenditures more following the ETS, whereas noninnovative firms do not increase capital investments after the ETS pilot. These findings suggest that the ETS could play a pivotal role in advancing the PRC’s economic restructuring efforts.

Infrastructure development is a major factor of interstate inequality in India’s economic development; however, much less is known about the causes of unequal infrastructure development. Using 11 parameters, this study develops three separate indices: physical, social, and financial infrastructures. It also examines the differential determinants using the system generalized method of moments model for 18 major states in India from 2005 to 2019. The results show that economic factors such as economic performance, financial development, investment, and economic structure have a pivotal impact on physical infrastructure. In addition to economic factors, fiscal (investment, capital expenditure, and internal debt) and demographic (urbanization, agglomeration, and scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population) factors emerge as more relevant in the case of social infrastructure. Political factors play an equally important role in all three types of infrastructure development. The magnitude and significance of drivers vary across the type of infrastructure considered.