Water pollution is becoming an increasing threat to China's sustainable development. To respond to this challenge, China has pledged to cut emissions of two major water pollutants, chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH4), and has disaggregated the national target among provinces. However, the abatement potential and costs have not been thoroughly assessed. This paper aims to examine the reduction potential and associated costs of COD and NH4 in the Chinese industrial sector.

Using eight rounds of household survey data that span two decades, this paper analyzes the determinants of household fuel choice in urban China. Using the correlated random effects generalized ordered probit model, the authors find that household fuel choice in urban China is related to fuel prices, households’ economic status and size and household head’s gender and education.

Using a three-period overlapping generations economy framework, we characterize an intergenerational welfare state with endogenous education and pension under voting. We show that although politically establishing Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) social security in isolation in a dynamically efficient economy will always reduce the capital investment and therefore the social welfare as expected, in contrast politically implementing education-pension policy package instead can improve both human and physical capital accumulation and social welfare over laissez faire.

This paper uses a unique village-level panel dataset on rural social public security to estimate the link between off-farm employment and rural crime in China. We find that, firstly, with one percent increase in off-farm employment, rural crimes and violating the security management and punishment regulations are projected to increase by 0.28 percent and 0.62 percent, respectively; secondly, there are no significant correlation between off-farm employment and rural civil disputes.