How the new media impacts rural development in China: an empirical study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study a new pathway out of poverty for rural areas through cultivating non-farm employment: the new media utilization. Design/methodology/approach The authors utilize two waves of nationwide micro survey data in China, China General Social Survey 2005 and 2013, to investigate the impacts of new media coverage on non-farm employment and earnings in rural China with the ordered probit model and instrument variables. Findings The authors find that promotion of new media coverage can significantly enhance rural non-farm employment in China by 10-20 percent and ultimately increase earnings for rural residents. The findings provide new evidence for the new media as a potential newly emerging pathway out of poverty for rural areas. The conclusions are robust regarding a variety of controls and model specifications, evaluations with alternative measures, examinations within different subsamples, and estimations with constructed pseudo panels. Social implications Encouragement of new media coverage in rural China not only can improve the rural non-farm employment and living standards but also can contribute toward narrowing the differences between urban and rural areas, thereby balancing regional development. Originality/value It contributes to the existing literature through primarily empirically investigating the economic functions of new media in rural China.

Informality and Mobility in the Labor Market: A pseudopanel's approach

One of the main limitations of labor market analysis in developing countries is the lack of appropriate panel data information. This paper extends the methodology of Dang et al. (2014) to examine labor market mobility between the formal and informal sectors in Bolivia and Colombia building consistent pseudo panels from repeated cross-sectional survey data. After testing the robustness of the methodology, we identified confidence intervals for mobility’s group in Bolivia and Colombia (formal to formal, informal to informal, formal to informal and informal to formal). The results provide evidence that in Bolivia and Colombia mobility between labor sectors is relatively low, which can explain the low variability of the informality rate in those countries. Results suggest that the number of people who move to the informal sector tends to be larger than those who scape from the informal market to the formal, or at least there is more variability across years for the first ones. This implies that public policies focused on labor market in Latin America would not lead to significant improvements if mobility patterns do not change.