China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China’s key challenge is whether it can become competitive in quasi-skilled and skilled industrial sectors so that upscale factories can be induced to establish themselves in China? This study seeks to increase our understanding of high school education in China at a time when the nation is facing challenges in its development path. Using secondary statistics, we have found that educational access at the high school level is quite low—especially in poorer areas of rural China. We argue that the low level of access to high school education in China may be a problem resulting from high tuition and fees. We include empirical evidence about the tuition barrier argument by using a survey of 41 developing and developed countries and a representative survey of 1,177 students from one of China’s poorest provinces. We demonstrate that not only is financing high school a burden for the families of poor students, but also there is little financial aid available. The quality of education of students from poor rural areas prior to entering high school is also a problem. We conclude with a recommendation that in poor rural areas of China high school should be made free, as it is in most of the rest of the world—and efforts should be made to improve rural education in general.

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in Shaanxi Province, a representative province in western rural China, this paper finds that dormitory and student canteen facilities in boarding schools are under-equipped and services are poor quality and far below that needed for student development. Poor services in boarding schools and inadequate nutrition intake may be an important cause of low student height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), as students eating at school have a much lower HAZ on average than that of non-boarding students. Furthermore, girls and students with more siblings have relatively lower HAZ, while the higher the number of parents a student has and the more educated they are exert a positive influence on child nutritional status in terms of HAZ. Finally, our analysis implies that the effective way to decrease the inequality of health, malnutrition and human capital between urban and rural in the long run is to improve the facilities and services of boarding schools in rural China.

The overall goal of the paper is to understand the progress of the design and implementation of China’s New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) program between 2004 (the second year of the program) and 2007. In the paper we seek to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of the program using a panel of national- representative, household survey data that were collected in 2005 and early 2008. According to our data, we confirm the recent reports by the Ministry of Health that there have been substantial improvements to the NCMS program in terms of coverage and participation. We also show that rural individuals also perceive an improvement in service by 2007. While the progress of the NCMS program is clear, there are still weaknesses. Most importantly, the program clearly does not meet one of its key goals of providing insurance against catastrophic illnesses. On average, individuals that required inpatient treatment in 2007 were reimbursed for 15% of their expenditures. Although this is higher than in 2004, on average, as the severity of the illness (in terms of expenditures on health care) rose, the real reimbursement rate (reimbursement amount/total expenditure on medical care) fell. The real reimbursement rate for illnesses that required expenditures between 4000 and 10000 yuan (over 10000 yuan) was only 11% (8%). Our analysis shows that one of the limiting factors is constrained funding.

Migration is one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, there are concerns about the potential negative effects of migration on the educational achievement of the children that are left behind in villages when one or both of their parents out-migrate to cities. This paper examines changes in school performance before and after the parents of students out-migrate. Surprisingly, we find that there is no significant negative effect of migration on school performance. In fact, we find that educational performance improves in migrant households in which the father out-migrates.

Previous studies have found that the returns to education in rural China are far lower than estimates for other developing economies. In this paper, we seek to determine why previous estimates are so low and provide estimates of what we believe are more accurate measures of the returns. Whereas estimates for the early 1990s average 2.3 percent, we find an average return of 6.4 percent. Furthermore, we find even higher returns among younger people, migrants, and for post-primary education. The paper demonstrates that, although part of the difference between our estimate and previous estimates can be attributed to increasing returns during the 1990s, a larger part of the difference is due to the nature of the data and the methodological approaches used by other authors.

Testing the tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family is complicated by the endogeneity of family size. Using data from the Chinese Population Census, this paper examines the effect of family size on child educational attainment in China. We find a negative correlation between family size and child educational attainment, even after we control for the birth order effect. We then instrument family size by the exogenous variation that is induced by a twin birth, and find a causal link between family size and children’s education. We also find that the effect of family size is more evident in rural China, where the public education system is poor. These findings suggest a quantity-quality tradeoff of children in developing countries.