Empirical evidence suggests that the prevalence of soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections in remote and poor rural areas is still high among children, the most vulnerable to infection. There is concern that STH infections may detrimentally affect children’s healthy development, including their cognitive ability, nutritional status, and school performance. Medical studies have not yet identified the exact nature of the impact STH infections have on children. The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between STH infections and developmental outcomes in 2,180 school-aged children in seven nationally-designated poverty counties in rural China. We conducted a large-scale survey in Guizhou province in southwest China in May, 2013. Overall, 42 percent of elementary school-aged children were infected with one or more of the three types of STH—Ascarislumbricoides (ascaris), Trichuris trichuria (whipworm) and the hookworms Ancylostoma duodenaleor Necator americanus. After controlling for socioeconomic status, we observed that children infected with one or more STHs have worse cognitive ability, worse nutritional status, and worse school performance than their uninfected peers.

Research increasingly indicates the importance of the nutritional programming that occurs in the first 2–3 years of life. Quality nutrition during this brief window has been shown to have large and significant effects on health and development throughout childhood and even into adulthood. Despite the widespread understanding of this critical window, and the long-term consequences of leaving nutritional deficiencies unaddressed, little is known about the status of infant nutrition in rural China, or about the relationship between infant nutrition and cognitive development in rural China.

We found that 48.8% of sample infants were anaemic, 3.7% were stunted, 1.2% were underweight and 1.6% were wasted. Approximately 20.0% of the sample infants were significantly delayed in their cognitive development, while just over 32.3% of the sample infants were significantly delayed in their psychomotor development. After controlling for potential confounders, infants with lower haemoglobin counts were significantly more likely to be delayed in both their cognitive (p<0.01) and psychomotor development (p<0.01).

This paper studies women’s participation in village elections. It focuses on the impact of voting rights training on women’s knowledge, and their voting behaviors in Ningxia, China, a Hui nationality autonomous region with a conservative cultural environment for women. A randomized controlled trial has been used in the study.

This article exploits a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an intensive, short-term inservice teacher training program on the performance of English teachers in Beijing migrant schools and their students. The results show no significant impacts of teacher training on either teacher or student English test scores and thus imply the ineffectiveness of short-term teacher training programs on teacher and student performance.

PURPOSE. We assessed the prevalence and predictors of inaccurate refractive error among rural refractionists in western China.

Over the past decade, China has implemented reforms designed to expand access to health care in rural areas. Little objective evidence exists, however, on the quality of that care. This paper reports results from a standardized patient study designed to assess the quality of care delivered by village clinicians in rural China. To measure quality, we recruited individuals from the local community to serve as undercover patients and trained them to present consistent symptoms of two common illnesses (dysentery and angina). Based on 82 covert interactions between the standardized patients and local clinicians, we find that the quality of care is low as measured by adherence to clinical checklists and the rates of correct diagnoses and treatments. Further analysis suggests that quality is most strongly correlated with provider qualifications. Our results highlight the need for policy action to address the low quality of care delivered by grassroots providers. 

This paper contributes to the assessment of China’s rural labor markets. According to our data, the increase in off-farm employment that China experienced during the 1980s and 1990s continued during the 2000s. Our analysis shows that migration has become the most prevalent off-farm activity, although the destination of migrants is shifting from outside of one’s province to destinations closer to home. The present paper finds that large shares of male and female individuals, especially those under 40 years, are working off the farm. These findings represent an important contribution to the labor economics field. First, the results of the present paper reveal that the labor transition from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sector for key segments of China’s rural labor force is nearly complete. Second, although a large share of China’s rural labor force work in agriculture, most of these workers are older men and women (and likely would not be willing to take low-wage, labor-intensive jobs). Third, the rising unskilled wage rate in China is partially a result of the tightening of the labor force in the young age cohorts. Finally, due to factors associated with the one child policy and other demographic transition forces, successive age cohorts will continue to fall in absolute number in the coming decade. Assuming China’s growth continues, we expect to see further wage increases since it will take higher wages to coax more workers to work off the farm.

Despite their recent deterioration, village clinics have historically been an important source of health care for the poor and elderly in rural China. In this paper, we examine the current role of village clinics, the patients who use them and some of the services they provide. We focus specifically on the role of village clinics in meeting the health-care needs of the rural poor and elderly. We find that although clinics are continuing to decline financially, they remain a source of care for the rural elderly and poor. We estimate that the elderly are 10–15 percent more likely than young individuals to seek care at a clinic. We show that clinics provide many unique services to support the rural elderly (and the elderly poor), such asin-home patient care, the option for patients to pay on credit, and free and discounted services.