This dissertations consists three essays on development issues in contemporary China. Two essays focus on the role of e-commerce in China's economic development and the third essay studies the latest trend of Chinese inequality. China has been the world's largest e-commerce market since 2013. E-commerce development in China has been fast but uneven with the rural and inland markets relatively left behind compared with city and coastal markets. Since 2014, the Chinese government has been supporting major e-commerce development in rural and remote areas. Chapter One studies the effect of the national-wide rural e-commerce program on rural residents' labor market outcomes. One likely consequence of the expansion of e-commerce is saving in time cost of shopping for people in remote villages. This paper analyzes the impact of this time saving on labor supply of men and women in rural China. I first uncover the heterogeneity of response in e-commerce use to the government program with a machine learning approach. Then to investigate the causal effect of e-commerce expansion, I exploit an interaction IV strategy making use of the roll-out time of the government program and heterogeneous response of online shopping to the program across distance and age structure, as supported by findings from the machine learning approach. My estimates suggest that e-commerce expansion increases weekly labor supply by 7 hours and the probability of working in the wage sector by 14 percentage points by relaxing the time budget constraint. The result is significant for both men and women, but in a gender differentiated manner. It shifts labor away from self-employed agriculture to the wage sector for men, and from working inside the home to outside the home for women. Chapter Two studies how local e-commerce development affect household consumption growth and its structure. By matching a nationally representative China Family Panel Studies survey with county-level e-commerce information obtained from Alibaba, this chapter examines how e-commerce development has shaped household consumption growth in China. The paper presents three major findings. First, e-commerce development is associated with higher consumption growth. Second, the relationship is stronger for the rural sample, inland regions, and poor households, suggesting that e-commerce development helps reduce spatial inequality in consumption. Third, the consumption of in-style goods and high-income elasticity goods has grown faster than the consumption of local services. Chapter Three investigates the long-term evolution and latest trend of Chinese inequality. The chapter argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and, according to some measures, even declining. A number of papers have been harbingers of this conclusion, but this paper consolidates the literature indicating a turnaround, and provides empirical foundations for it. The argument is made using a range of data sources and a range of measures and perspectives on inequality. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income source and population subgroup. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy. We relate the turnaround to two classic phenomena in the development economics literature-the Lewis turning point and the Kuznets turning point. The plateauing is not yet a full blown decline, and there are short term variations. But the narrative on Chinese inequality now needs to accommodate the possibility of a turnaround in inequality, and to focus on the reasons for this turnaround.

This publication, produced by FAO and Zhejiang University, examines how rural e-commerce could advance the digital transformation of agri-food systems, including increasing production efficiency, expanding farmers’ market access, improving poverty alleviation, fostering agricultural entrepreneurship, and attracting young generations back to their villages for economic revival and rural revitalization. It is highlighted that an enabling ecosystem with favourable government policies and strategies, public-private partnerships and innovative business models is of great importance to accelerate the development of rural areas in China, and generate larger economic, social and environmental impacts. As the largest developing country in the world, the experience of digital agriculture transformation in China could be shared with other developing countries. The report also discusses some of the challenges encountered and lessons learned during the development of rural e-commerce, as well as the proposals for the way forward.

While informal economics are normally treated as the "sickness" of the cities to be cured, they have their own treasure parts to retain. They brought the boom of Chinese economy to some extent. In the era of great construction and rebuilding of cities as urbanization mode, developing countries may take the informal economic site as a great chance to make a profit since they have enough reasons to rebuild those areas. They are often mentioned as a problem that needs to be solved and, in most cases, it means reconstruction. Vested interests are happy to integrate these resources and announce that the threat to the cities is finally eliminated. Those reconstructions are standardizing those communities and reaping the benefits brought by the communities. They benefit not by the plunder of capital, but by the elimination of the social subjectivity of those who have created value. E-commerce villages are one of those communities. They seized the opportunity of e-commerce development to make profit and support the online economy to grow rapidly and vigorously. The informality and the "unintegration" of those areas led to the trend of reconstruction. However, the reconstructions are tending to take the existing urban pattern of residential areas as their template. This is the easiest and fastest way of thinking and not problematic in most of the cases. However, such a way made the e-commerce villages lose their locality since the templates do not actually fit the operating mode of those villages. The thesis is researching on the economic pattern and the social relation in those e-commerce villages and proposing a possible choice for those villages based on the research, trying to make the areas more economically efficient and more livable at the same time

Despite its low penetration in China's vast rural areas, the Internet is generally perceived as a new engine for rural empowerment. By examining five Internet application initiatives in rural China, this book offers a unique view of the diffusion and usage of the Internet and its implications on the lives of rural people. Placed in the political, socioeconomic and infrastructure contexts of rural China, the book departs from the classical diffusion of innovations model and extends the existing knowledge on the adoption and usage of the Internet by rural people. In addition to testing the applicability of the diffusion of innovations theory to the diffusion of Information and Communications Technologies in the rural areas today, the study provides rich empirical evidence regarding the actual impact of the Internet on the livelihood of rural people. It also shows some innovative uses of the Internet in rural development.

This book provides a timely update on the ongoing transformation of the Chinese economy. As the world's second largest economy, China marked the 40th anniversary of economic reform and opening-up in 2018. In this book, top scholars on Chinese economic studies review China's remarkable economic achievement in the past four decades and analyse the challenges facing economic development in the country.The book focusses on structural changes of China's economy, which are essential to steer the country towards sustainable development. It studies the long-term factors affecting the Chinese economy such as education and innovation, and emerging sources of economic growth, such as e-commerce. Other important aspects of the Chinese economy explored in this book include the economic role of the Chinese government, fiscal reforms, capital account liberalisation, housing policies, competition policy and anti-monopoly law, China's export, trends of regional development and reforms of state-owned enterprises.This rich collection of policy-oriented economic studies is also a tribute to Professor John Wong, former research director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, who passed away in June 2018. For over three decades, Professor Wong had followed and provided insightful analyses on China's economic development.

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: HD, RMIT University (Institute of Economics, Marketing and Finance), course: Culture and Business Practice in Asia, language: English, abstract: During the last decade Internet usage has experienced a tremendous increase in the Asian region and especially in China. According to Internet World Stats (2010) the number of internet users in Asia from 2000 to 2010 increased from 114.3 million to 825.1 million (721.8%). In the same time period China's number of Internet users increased from 22.5 million in December 2000 to approximately 420 million by June 2010 representing an increase of more than 1,800% (see table 1). Full-functional internet connection for private households in China, for example, was first established on 20 April 1994 (China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), 2010) and was followed by steady growth.