【正文】
e concept of externalities and imperfect markets. Externalities are benefits or costs received by or imposed on parties other than the direct participants in an economic transaction. In the case of education, we can argue that there are significant positive externalities, ., significant external benefits, from more education. These externalities include things like new knowledge creation, more efficient workers, more worker cooperation producing productivity gains, etc. This means that it could be justified for government to pay for some parts of education because private persons may buy too little and these externalities will then be less than they should be. But we still need to know whether the private return is greater than the opportunity cost of capital and whether the right amount of education will be bought by private individuals. We can show that some subsidies may be required even under relatively perfect market conditions to get the optimal amount of education. But we also have to take into account that markets are not perfect. Education can be regarded as a merit good where a merit good is one that society will underconsume or underinvest in due to ignorance uncertainty or irrationality In this case, more subsidies may be required to achieve the optimal amount of education. The three readings for this section of the course all deal with the case of China. One of these papers looks at human resource investment specifically after first observing that regional inequality in China has soared in the last 20 years. The gap between the coastal region and other regions has increased significantly since 1991. By 2020, the ratio of real percapita GDP between the wealthiest province and the poorest was . The northeast region which was the leading region in real percapita GDP in 1978, by 2020 was 30% behind the coastal region. The coast’s advantage over the interior region and the far west was in terms of the real percapita GDP ratio. The auth