| Abstract: | Abstract. We analyse the unemployment problem in the largest Chinese city, Shanghai, based on a survey of the unemployed conducted in late 1989. We find, as expected, that unemployment is particularly serious among school-leavers and contract and temporary workers, but also find a surprisingly high incidence of unemployment amongst permanent state employees and relatively long unemployment durations. The Shanghai unemployed rely heavily on occasional work for support, and only a small proportion-receive state benefit. We identify problems of interpretation stemming from the stock-sampling nature of the survey, and use non-parametric methods to reveal an underlying strong downward movement in individual re-employment probabilities. |
