Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System

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Abstract

China's civil examination system (keju), an incredibly long-lived institution, has a persistent impact on human capital outcomes today. Using the variation in the density of jinshi—the highest qualification—across 278 Chinese prefectures in the Ming-Qing period (c. 1368–1905) to proxy for this effect, we find that a doubling of jinshi per 10,000 population leads to an 8.5% increase in years of schooling in 2010. The persistent effect of keju can be attributed to a multitude of channels including cultural transmission, educational infrastructure, social capital and, to a lesser extent, political elites.

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MEASURING ECONOMIC GROWTH FROM OUTER SPACE.

J Henderson, Adam Storeygard, David N Weil (2012)

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurement error in national income accounts. For countries with good national income accounts data, information on growth of lights is of marginal value in estimating the true growth rate of income, while for countries with the worst national income accounts, the optimal estimate of true income growth is a composite with roughly equal weights. Among poor-data countries, our new estimate of average annual growth differs by as much as 3 percentage points from official data. Lights data also allow for measurement of income growth in sub- and supranational regions. As an application, we examine growth in Sub Saharan African regions over the last 17 years. We find that real incomes in non-coastal areas have grown faster by 1/3 of an annual percentage point than coastal areas; non-malarial areas have grown faster than malarial ones by 1/3 to 2/3 annual percent points; and primate city regions have grown no faster than hinterland areas. Such applications point toward a research program in which "empirical growth" need no longer be synonymous with "national income accounts."

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Author and article information

Journal

Title: The Economic Journal

Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)

ISSN (Print): 0013-0133

ISSN (Electronic): 1468-0297

Publication date Created: October 2020

Publication date Created: October 16 2020

Publication date Created: April 14 2020

Publication date Other: October 2020

Publication date (Print): October 16 2020

Publication date (Electronic): April 14 2020

Volume: 130

Issue: 631

Pages: 2030-2064

Affiliations

[1 ]Hong Kong Baptist University

[2 ]The University of Hong Kong

Article

DOI: 10.1093/ej/ueaa043

SO-VID: 8919c112-219a-4308-aa48-22c59876aad3

License:

https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model

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