JSPES, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring 2011)
pp. 55-79

Chinese Regional Unemployment: Neighborhood and Spillover Effects

Yu-Kun Wang

Department of Political Economy
National Cheng Kung University
Taiwan

Many studies of regional unemployment have found a significant neighborhood and spillover effect across regions within a country, but few papers have focused on how these factors relate to the Chinese regional labor market. In this paper we analyze the Chinese labor market and find that, besides the macro-environment and spatial effects that are commonly observed in the literature, regional institutional variables have had a significant impact on Chinese unemployment. As such, neighborhood and spillover effects are described in terms of their effect on Chinese regional unemployment.