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China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?

Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022

China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.

Demand for Retirement Insurance: What Do People Want?

Cheng Wan, Hazel Bateman, Hanming Fang, Katja Hanewald, Oct 02, 2024

This article discusses the diversity and preference variations in the demand for retirement insurance among urban residents in China, particularly the high demand for health-related insurance such as critical illness (CI) and long-term care (LTC) insurance, and how individual financial circumstances, risk appetites, and bequest motives significantly influence their choice of retirement insurance products.

Increasing government transparency reduced pollution violations and improved air quality in China

Mengdi Liu, Mark Buntaine, Sarah Anderson, Bing Zhang, Sep 03, 2025

Government transparency helps bridge gaps between environmental laws and actual practices, improving health and environmental quality broadly.

Superstition Everywhere

Jinfan Zhang, Huancheng Du, Mar 09, 2022

In Chinese culture, digit 8 (4) is taken as lucky (unlucky). We find that the numerological superstition has a profound impact across China’s stock, bond and foreign exchange markets, affecting asset prices in both the primary and secondary markets. The superstition effect, i.e., the probability of asset price ending with a lucky (unlucky) digit far exceeds (falls short of) what would be expected by chance, is everywhere.

Environmentally Inclined Politicians and Local Environmental Performance:Evidence from Publicly Listed Firms in China

Hanming Fang, Honglin Ren, Danwen Song, Nianhang Xu, May 31, 2023

We investigate whether and how environmentally inclined politicians (EIPs), i.e., politicians with prior environment-related work experience, affect local environmental performance in China.