China's real unemployment rate is much higher than the official rate and, when correctly measured, is much closer to that in other nations at similar levels of development, according to Long Run Trends in Unemployment and Labor Force Participation in China (NBER Working Paper No. 21460). The study estimates that the actual unemployment rate in 2002-09 averaged nearly 11 percent, while the official rate averaged less than half that. Moreover, despite some reports to the contrary, by 2009 China's labor market had still not recovered from huge layoffs that occurred during the later 1990s and early 2000s as the nation transitioned from a government-controlled economy to one in which private enterprise and market forces were more at play.
"The official unemployment rate series for China is implausible and is an outlier in the distribution of unemployment rates across countries ranked by their stage of development," write researchers Shuaizhang Feng, Yingyao Hu, and Robert Moffitt. "We find that, by approximately 2002, the unemployment in China was actually higher than that of high income countries, exactly the opposite of what is implied by the official series."
The official unemployment rate in China, which is based on registered unemployment figures, has long been viewed with suspicion. Various private studies have tried to come up with better estimates. This paper uses for the first time a nationally representative sample of registered urban residents–the "hukou" population–based on urban household survey data, supplemented with weights derived from the decennial census. The study derives a much different picture of how Chinese unemployment has evolved since the mid-1990s.
THE growth of China’s economy is staggering: it produced $9.5 trillion-worth of goods and services in 2013, nearly three times more than in 2007. But has that growth come simply from deploying more labour and capital? Or did total factor productivity (TFP)—the efficiency with which those two inputs are used—also increase? China’s future growth hinges on the answer.
A period of high growth does not necessarily involve a rise in productivity. The more people there are in employment, and the more factories and roads there are for them to use, the bigger an economy will be. But those workers and roads may not be put to good use. As long as the amount by which labour and capital grow outpaces any fall in productivity, GDP will still increase.
Growth of this sort, however, can last only so long. Neither labour nor capital are infinite. In the long run, improving the productivity with which they are used is the magic ingredient for any economy, the only path to sustainable growth. Hence the concerns about China. A series of estimates published this year have all suggested that productivity is flagging.
At the pessimistic end of the range is Harry Wu, an economist who has devoted much research to the shortcomings of China’s official economic data. He finds that since 2007 TFP has actually been a drag on the economy, denting growth by about 0.9 percentage points a year. At the more optimistic end, researchers at the World Bank think TFP added nearly three percentage points a year to growth from 2000 to 2010—but even they reckon that is 40% lower than in the 1990s. In between these two estimates are Jianhua Zhang, Chunxia Jiang and Peng Wang, two of whom are with the People’s Bank of China. They conclude that productivity increased just 1.5% a year between 1997 and 2012.
As these diverging estimates suggest, overall productivity growth, despite being central to economics, is frustratingly difficult to pin down. It cannot, after all, be seen. When comparing two workers with the same job in the same company, it is easy to determine which one produces more. For economies, such apple-to-apple comparisons are not possible. Instead, economists get at TFP by subtracting the change in capital and labour deployed from the change in overall output. The difference (known as the Solow residual, after Robert Solow, the economist who pioneered this method) reflects the contribution of productivity to growth. In this way, the unseen becomes visible.
But the process requires several accounting somersaults. Assumptions are needed about, among other things, the size of the capital stock, the rate of capital depreciation and the level of workers’ education. Mr Wu does not trust official GDP figures and so constructs his own. Because his estimate of average annual growth for 2008-12 (6.5%) is dramatically lower than the official figure (9.3%), his calculations yield a negative Solow residual. Productivity, in other words, appears to have gone into reverse.
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THERE are a number of ways to measure the might of a nation: military power, commercial clout, cultural influence. But ever since statisticians started rigorously calculating economic output in the 1930s, economists have fixated on one measure: gross domestic product (GDP). By one variant of that yardstick, China is on the verge of becoming the world’s mightiest country.
Comparing the economic output of countries is tricky. The most straightforward way is to convert GDPs into a single currency (usually dollars) at market exchange rates. This is a good way to gauge countries’ international heft, and by this measure China’s economy is still 43% smaller than America’s. But for comparing living standards or growth rates, market exchange rates can be misleading. Exchange rates can be volatile, yielding vastly different GDP values on different days. Governments often meddle with them. Most important, they are influenced by prices for internationally traded items, but they do not reflect the cost of purely domestic goods and services, such as haircuts or bus rides. Since rich-world barbers are more expensive than those in poor economies but not vastly more productive, using market exchange rates to compare GDPs understates the productive capacity and living standards of the emerging world.
The International Comparison Programme (ICP) was established in 1968 in an attempt to allow for such things. Statisticians collate the cost of comparable goods and services in different countries. They then adjust output figures to take account of the lower cost of those items in poorer countries—a method known as purchasing-power parity (PPP). The Economist’s Big Mac index is based on the same premise, although it looks at the price of just one item. The ICP’s first survey in 1970 took in only ten countries. The latest, released on April 30th but based on prices from 2011, provides data for 199 economies and estimates for another 15 (see chart).
The previous ICP survey, released in 2005, attracted criticism for its results from China, which were based on data from just 11 cities. This, some argued, overestimated the cost of living and therefore underestimated the size of the Chinese economy on a PPP basis. That, along with the difficulty of accounting for varying rates of inflation since 2005, meant the PPP data were getting ever more inaccurate: the new data put China’s PPP exchange rate 20% higher. The old PPP exchange rates had suggested that China’s economy would overtake America’s in 2019; the new ones imply that it will do so by the end of this year.
IS CHINA’S economy underheating? Not long ago, many people would have scoffed at the suggestion. The country is known for searing property prices, hot-money inflows and the steam escaping from its financial furnaces. The stock of outstanding credit, broadly defined, climbed to over 180% of GDP at the end of 2013, according to the central bank, and over 215%, according to an even broader measure by Fitch, a ratings agency.
But house prices are slowing, exports are weak and shadow banking is losing ground to traditional lending. Forecasters expected industrial output to grow by 9.5% in the first two months of 2014, compared with a year earlier; it grew by only 8.6%.
Moreover, evidence of excess has long been absent from the traditional measure of economic overheating: inflation. New figures suggest that consumer prices rose by only 2% in the year to February, well below China’s average inflation of over 3% in the past decade. The prices paid to producers fell, again.
One way to reconcile the inflation number with other signs of excess is to disbelieve it. China’s critics routinely argue that inflation is higher than the government’s statisticians claim. But although it is easy to say the official figures are bad, it is difficult to quantify how bad.
That is the tricky task that Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson and Miao Liu of Columbia University set themselves in a recent study. They start with an economic law first observed by a 19th-century statistician, Ernst Engel: richer households spend a smaller share of their income on food. Thus as a household becomes richer over time, its spending pattern should match that of households who were equally rich a year or two before.
But in China, they discovered something different. They compared urban households in 2006 with households that were, according to the official figures, equally rich in 2008. They discovered that the later households were devoting 3-4% more of their budgets to food. Perhaps they were not quite as rich as their 2006 counterparts, after all.
Neither phylogenomic nor palaeontological data support a Palaeogene origin of placental mammals.
Authors:
dos Reis et al
Abstract:
O'Leary et al. (O'Leary et al. 2013 Science 339, 662-667. (doi:10.1126/science.1229237)) performed a fossil-only dating analysis of mammals, concluding that the ancestor of placentals post-dated the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary, contradicting previous palaeontological and molecular studies that placed the ancestor in the Cretaceous. They incorrectly used fossil ages as species divergence times for crown groups, while in fact the former should merely form minimum-age bounds for the latter. Statistical analyses of the fossil record have shown that crown groups are significantly older than the oldest ingroup fossil, so that fossils do not directly reflect the true ages of clades. Here, we analyse a 20 million nucleotide genome-scale alignment in conjunction with a probabilistic interpretation of the fossil ages from O'Leary et al. Our combined analysis of fossils and molecules demonstrates that Placentalia originated in the Cretaceous.
Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities.
A new study released Monday (Jan. 6) in the journal Crime & Delinquency provides the first contemporary findings on how the risk of arrest varies across race and gender, says Robert Brame, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and lead author of the study.
The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18, and their arrest histories, which run the gamut from truancy and underage drinking to more serious and violent offenses. The study excludes arrests for minor traffic violations.
Most striking are the race differences revealed in the study, Brame says. In particular, the research points to a higher prevalence of arrest among black males and little race variation in arrest rates among females.
"A problem is that many males – especially black males – are navigating the transition from youth to adulthood with the baggage and difficulties from contact with the criminal justice system," Brame says.
The negative impacts can be great, he says. "States vary on the age that adolescents are considered adults in the eyes of the criminal law, some as young as age 16 and 17," he says. "Criminal records that show up in searches can impede employment, reduce access to housing, thwart admission to and financing for higher education and affect civic and volunteer activities such as voting or adoption. They also can damage personal and family relationships."
Shawn Bushway, a criminal justice professor at the University at Albany who collaborated with Brame on the study, says they used data from the U.S. Department of Labor's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort (NLYS97).
Growth in China’s services industries slowed in December, separate surveys have found, echoing a slowdown in manufacturing and confirming views that the economy lost steam at the end of last year.
HSBC on Monday released its purchasing managers’ index for services, compiled by Markit Economics, showing a drop to 50.9 in December, its lowest level since August 2011, from 52.5 in November. But the figure remained above the 50-point level that indicates expansion in activity. New business growth was the slowest in six months.
A similar survey by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, released Friday, also showed a slowdown in service sector growth in December, to a four-month low of 54.6, from the previous month’s 56.
Indexes from the government and HSBC last week showed that China’s factory activity slowed in December, suggesting the moderation in the country’s growth in the final quarter of 2013 was broad-based.
The weaker purchasing managers’ indexes contributed to a decline in Asian markets on Monday, on concern over whether China’s slowdown would continue into the first quarter.
Quantifying the process and abruptness of the end-Permian mass extinction
Authors:
Wang et al
Abstract:
Studies of the end-Permian mass extinction have suggested a variety of patterns from a single catastrophic event to multiple phases. But most of these analyses have been based on fossil distributions from single localities. Although single sections may simplify the interpretation of species diversity, they are susceptible to bias from stratigraphic incompleteness and facies control of preservation. Here we use a data set of 1450 species from 18 fossiliferous sections in different paleoenvironmental settings across South China and the northern peri-Gondwanan region, and integrate it with high-precision geochronologic data to evaluate the rapidity of the largest Phanerozoic mass extinction. To reduce the Signor-Lipps effect, we applied constrained optimization (CONOP) to search for an optimal sequence of first and last occurrence datums for all species and generate a composite biodiversity pattern based on multiple sections. This analysis indicates that an abrupt extinction of 62% of species took place within 200 Kyr. The onset of the sudden extinction is around 252.3 Ma, just below Bed 25 at the Meishan section. Taxon turnover and diversification rates suggest a deterioration of the living conditions nearly 1.2 Myr before the sudden extinction. The magnitude of the extinction was such that there was no immediate biotic recovery. Prior suggestions of highly variable, multi-phased extinction patterns reflect the impact of the Signor-Lipps effect and facies-dependent occurrences, and are not supported following appropriate statistical treatment of this larger data set.
PLANETARY POPULATIONS IN THE MASS-PERIOD DIAGRAM: A STATISTICAL TREATMENT OF EXOPLANET FORMATION AND THE ROLE OF PLANET TRAPS
Authors:
Yasuhiro Hasegawa and Ralph E. Pudritz
Abstract:
The rapid growth of observed exoplanets has revealed the existence of several distinct planetary populations in the mass-period diagram. Two of the most surprising are (1) the concentration of gas giants around 1 AU and (2) the accumulation of a large number of low-mass planets with tight orbits, also known as super-Earths and hot Neptunes. We have recently shown that protoplanetary disks have multiple planet traps that are characterized by orbital radii in the disks and halt rapid type I planetary migration. By coupling planet traps with the standard core accretion scenario, we showed that one can account for the positions of planets in the mass-period diagram. In this paper, we demonstrate quantitatively that most gas giants formed at planet traps tend to end up around 1 AU, with most of these being contributed by dead zones and ice lines. We also show that a large fraction of super-Earths and hot Neptunes are formed as "failed" cores of gas giants—this population being constituted by comparable contributions from dead zone and heat transition traps. Our results are based on the evolution of forming planets in an ensemble of disks where we vary only the lifetimes of disks and their mass accretion rates onto the host star. We show that a statistical treatment of the evolution of a large population of planetary cores caught in planet traps accounts for the existence of three distinct exoplanetary populations—the hot Jupiters, the more massive planets around r = 1 AU, and the short-period super-Earths and hot Neptunes. There are very few populations that feed into the large orbital radii characteristic of the imaged Jovian planet, which agrees with recent surveys. Finally, we find that low-mass planets in tight orbits become the dominant planetary population for low-mass stars (M * ≤ 0.7 M ☉).
Spatial Bias in the Marine Fossil Record
Authors:
Daril A. Vilhena and Andrew B. Smith
Abstract:
Inference of past and present global biodiversity requires enough global data to distinguish biological pattern from sampling artifact. Pertinently, many studies have exposed correlated relationships between richness and sampling in the fossil record, and methods to circumvent these biases have been proposed. Yet, these studies often ignore paleobiogeography, which is undeniably a critical component of ancient global diversity. Alarmingly, our global analysis of 481,613 marine fossils spread throughout the Phanerozoic reveals that where localities are and how intensively they have been sampled almost completely determines empirical spatial patterns of richness, suggesting no separation of biological pattern from sampling pattern. To overcome this, we analyze diversity using occurrence records drawn from two discrete paleolatitudinal bands which cover the bulk of the fossil data. After correcting the data for sampling bias, we find that these two bands have similar patterns of richness despite markedly different spatial coverage. Our findings suggest that i) long-term diversity trends result from large-scale tectonic evolution of the planet, ii) short-term diversity trends are region-specific, and iii) paleodiversity studies must constrain their analyses to well-sampled regions to uncover patterns not driven by sampling.
The quality of the fossil record of anomodonts (Synapsida, Therapsida)
Authors:
Marcus Walther and Jörg Fröbisch
Abstract:
The quality of the fossil record of anomodont synapsids, one of the major clades of Permian–Triassic terrestrial tetrapods, is assessed. A Character Completeness Metric (CCM2) is calculated for each taxon and consecutive time intervals at a global scale and in the South African Karoo Basin. The mean completeness score is 66.80% (globally) and 77.37% (regionally) with completeness ranging between 60.12% and 91.33% per time interval. Up-to-date taxic, phylogenetic and residual diversity estimates confirm the general biodiversity trends recovered by recent analyses. The consistently high CCM2 scores throughout their evolutionary history together with a lack of correlation with biodiversity patterns and sampling proxies document a high quality of the known anomodont fossil record. In fact, when compared to other vertebrate groups, the completeness values for anomodonts are exceptionally high. Yet, whether this pattern results from the unrivalled record of the Karoo Basin or whether it is clade-specific and unique to anomodonts remains to be tested.
The early evolution of synapsids, and the influence of sampling on their fossil record
Authors:
1. Neil Brocklehurst (a)
2. Christian F. Kammerer (a)
3. Jörg Fröbisch (a)
Affiliation:
a. Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung, Invalidenstrae 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
Synapsids dominated the terrestrial realm between the late Pennsylvanian and the Triassic. Their early evolution includes some of the first amniotes to evolve large size, herbivory, and macro-predators. However, little research has focused on the changes in diversity occurring during this early phase in their evolutionary history, with more effort concentrating on later events such the Permo-Triassic extinction. Here we assess synapsid diversity, at both the species and genus levels, between the Carboniferous (Moscovian) and the Middle Permian (Capitanian). A raw, taxic diversity (richness) estimate is generated, and we use two separate methods to correct for sampling biases in this curve. To remove the effect of anthropogenic sampling bias, we apply a recently published modification of the residual diversity method, and then generate a supertree, using matrix representation with parsimony to infer ghost lineages and obtain a phylogenetic diversity estimate. The general diversity pattern reflects the initial diversification of synapsids in the late Pennsylvanian and early Cisuralian, which was followed by an extinction event during the Sakmarian. Diversity recovered during the Artinskian and Kungurian, coinciding with the radiation of Caseidae, although other families begin to decline. A second extinction event occurred across the Kungurian/Roadian boundary, in which Edaphosauridae and Ophiacodontidae died out although Caseidae and Therapsida diversified. The sampling-corrected curves reveal further extinction during the Roadian, although therapsids were again unaffected. Pelycosaurian-grade synapsids survived during the Wordian and Capitanian, but were a minor part of an otherwise therapsid-dominated fauna. Evidence of significant anthropogenic sampling bias calls into question previous diversity studies that have not employed sampling correction.
