China has a distinguished history, in statistical terms, of keeping tabs on its citizenry. Recently, increasingly sophisticated surveys are making number crunching easier for outsiders and the paper highlighted today is based on one such survey.
The China Household Finance Survey covers 25 provinces, 65 cities, 80 counties, and 320 communities, including 8,438 households and 29,234 individuals and from this Shihe Fu, Yu Liao and Junfu Fang, of the Southwestern and Clark universities respectively, have drilled out an interesting observation.
The higher home prices go the more likely women are to withdraw from the labor force. How much more likely? The researchers show [With a little too much precision for my taste] a 100k Rmb increase in the value of a property reduces the likelihood of women participating in the labor force by 1.37%. The same move doesn’t seem to affect men’s participation.
An interesting observation for planners, I’m not sure what investors are supposed to do with the information? [BTW if you’re interested to go a little more into how to deal with data from China, unlike many who prefer to believe it’s all made up, I can recommend a good recent book on the subject you’ll find at this link Myth-Busting China’s Numbers]
The paper in full can be found at Housing Wealth – Labor Force Participation
Happy Sunday.