The following article is the first in an occasional series introducing new data bases. The series intends to make new development data bases more widely available and to contribute to discussion and further research on economic development issues. The data bases included in the series are selected for their potential usefulness for research and policy analysis on critical issues in developing and transition economies. Some are drawn from micro-level firm or household surveys; others contain country-level data. The authors describe the data contents, criteria for inclusion or exclusion of values, sources, strengths and weaknesses, and any plans for maintenance or updating. Each data base is available

The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank cannot guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply on the part of the World Bank any judgment of the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries. Rights and Permissions The material in this work is copyrighted. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or inclusion in any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior

Yu, Tao Zhang, and Shaohua Chen. China Economic Review 11, 149-170. 2000. 2 shift resources from the rich and the poor to the middle class. We do not find schooling and urbanization to be a significant explanatory factor. I.

ha comparative genomic studies in Rosaceae. Zhang et al. BMC Genomics 2012, 13:537

The future is a chance you should take. It is a creation and everyone has his or her own vision. It will look the way we make it look. —Maja Sasek Over 5,000 children and students from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, FYR Macedonia, and Romania took part in art and essay contests on their vision of the future for themselves, their cities, and their countries and regions. A selection of their paintings was displayed in an exhibit entitled “Children Look to the Horizon, ” which was shown at the World

Recently, the research in face recognition has focused on developing a face representation that is capable of capturing the relevant information in a manner which is invariant to facial expression and illumination. Motivated by a simple but powerful texture descriptor, called Local Binary Pattern (LBP), our proposed system extends this descriptor to evoke multiresolution and multispectral analysis for face recognition. The first descriptor, namely Multi-scale Local Binary Pattern Histogram (MLBPH), provides a robust system which is relatively insensitive to localisation errors because it benefits from the multiresolution information captured from the regional histogram. The second proposed descriptor, namely Multispectral Local Binary Pattern Histogram (MSLBP), captures the mutual relationships between neighbours at pixel level from each spectral channel. By measuring the spatial correlation between spectra, we expect to achieve higher recognition rate. The resulting LBP methods provide input to LDA and various classifier fusion methods for face recognition. These systems are implemented and compared with existing Local Binary Pattern face recognition systems and other state of art systems on Feret, XM2VTS and FRGC 2.0 databases, giving very promising results

China’s economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China’s institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve the “China puzzle, ” this paper analyzes China’s institution—a regionally decentralized authoritarian system. The central government has control over personnel, whereas subnational governments run the bulk of the economy; and they initiate, negotiate, implement, divert, and resist reforms, policies, rules, and laws. China’s reform trajectories have been shaped by regional decentralization. Spectacular performance on the one hand and grave problems on the other hand are all determined by this governance structure.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of large-scale knowledge bases, including Wikipedia, Freebase, YAGO, Mi-crosoft’s Satori, and Google’s Knowledge Graph. To in-crease the scale even further, we need to explore automatic methods for constructing knowledge bases. Previous ap-proaches have primarily focused on text-based extraction, which can be very noisy. Here we introduce Knowledge Vault, a Web-scale probabilistic knowledge base that com-bines extractions from Web content (obtained via analysis of text, tabular data, page structure, and human annotations) with prior knowledge derived from existing knowledge repos-itories. We employ supervised machine learning methods for fusing these distinct information sources. The Knowledge Vault is substantially bigger than any previously published structured knowledge repository, and features a probabilis-tic inference system that computes calibrated probabilities of fact correctness. We report the results of multiple studies that explore the relative utility of the different information sources and extraction methods. Keywords Knowledge bases; information extraction; probabilistic mod-els; machine learning 1.

In this paper, we investigate how reductions of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution, which make it easier for rural migrants to register as temporary residents in urban destinations. We make use of a large panel household and village data set supplemented by an original follow-up survey, and find a robust negative relationship between migrant opportunity and high school enrollment. This effect is consistent with our finding of low returns to high school education among migrants from surveyed villages.

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