Speaker:

Dr Sng Tuan Hwee
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore

Date:

Friday, 24 November 2017, 3:30pm-5:00pm

Venue:

EAI Conference Room
NUS Bukit Timah Campus
469A Bukit Timah Road
Tower Block #06-01
Singapore 259770

Abstract:

What happens when subnational boundaries are badly drawn? The speaker uses China as a case study to investigate the ramifications. As Chinese provincial and longstanding socioeconomic boundaries are not fully aligned, counties of the same province may not share the same regional identity. Using Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalisation campaign in 1991-92 to implement a difference-in-differences, the annual growth differential between non-dislocated and dislocated counties is found to have increased by 3.1 percentage points after Deng’s campaign galvanised the provinces to pursue economic expansion. Discrimination against the dislocated counties by the provincial authorities is also apparent.

About the Speaker:

Sng Tuan Hwee is Assistant Professor of Economics at the National University of Singapore (2012—). He is interested in economic history and political economy and specialises in comparative institutional analysis, with a focus on China and Japan. Dr Sng earned his BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and his MA and PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. Before joining the NUS, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Niehaus Centre for Globalisation and Governance at Princeton University (2011–12).