We study the effect of geography and in particular of market access on wages by working with individual data from 56 Chinese cities in 11 different provinces. By applying the theory of the New Economic Geography on individual survey data, we contribute to the explanation of growing disparities within the country, and even within provinces. We examine to what extent proximity to markets can explain inter-individual wage heterogeneity and growing wage disparities within Chinese provinces. Using a New Economic Geography style model, we derive an econometric specification relating wages to market access. The latter is calculated as a transport cost weighted sum of the surrounding locations’ market capacities. Based on data from 1995 on around 10,000 Chinese workers, and after controlling for individual skills and factor endowments, we find that a significant fraction of inter-individual differences in terms of return to labor can be explained by the geography of access to markets. Moreover, our study investigates whether the relationship between market access and wages holds for all types of workers equally and shows that the magnitude of the impact depends on the firm type and the level of qualification.
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Paper provided by CEPII research center in its series Working Papers with number
2006-23.
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