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The purpose of this paper is to understand the dynamics of private sector employment in China in recent years and to provide insight into the effects private sector employment has had on internal variations in growth and development. Our findings indicate a divergence in employment sources in cities and the countryside, a growing spatial divide between areas that rely on state-owned enterprises for employment, and places where the private sector is an increasingly important employer. We conclude that private enterprises are essential drivers of prosperity in urban China but are less significant for employment or growth in rural areas.

Using most recent data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for China, this research shows that ownership structure has a significant impact on firm performance and firm characteristics. Our results show the importance of getting to grips with government regulation, as the time spent by senior management dealing with government regulation is the most significant independent variable. Another key finding of this paper is that China has very good economic institutions that are conductive to doing business. It is far easier to conduct business in China than the other BRIC countries. We conclude that partial privatisations of SOEs on its own is unlikely to bring huge gains in efficiency. Reforms must also include better incentives and monitoring of management. Our findings are robust and consistent to various controls, alternative measures of firm performance, and different estimation methods including quantile regression.

This article considers drivers of second job holding among the self-employed in comparison with the employed. Econometric analysis of panel data explores whether the self-employed are more or less likely to take on a second job when already running their own business than their employed counterparts. The findings contribute to the literature through identification of a need-based variable—difficulty in meeting housing costs—as a key driver of movements from self-employment to hybrid entrepreneurship. Findings, further, identify different patterns of second job holding by gender, particularly among self-employed individuals.

This paper empirically examines time-use and its impact on satisfaction levels among dual career households in a post-industrial economy, the UK. Analysis explores the 1993-2009 British Household Panel Survey using panel probit regression. The evidence reveals distinctions in time-use relative to gender, occupations, and employment sector. Long hours persist among managers and professionals. The uneven division of household labour, further, continues to burden women with extensive amounts of housework and care. Satisfaction with working hours and amount/use of leisure time are lower among women, especially public sector professionals. Provision of care, occupation, and partner employment characteristics represent important satisfaction determinants present among women, while income (including partner’s income) only has relevance among men. Housework does not itself generate dissatisfaction. It is the overload of household tasks, due to inequality in the household division of labour, which constrains many highly skilled working women reducing satisfaction with time-use and life overall.

The forecasted changes in global climate include not only shifts in average conditions, but also changes in the frequency and intensity of climatic extremes. One such climate extreme expected to change in the future are extreme cold spells. Although these disturbances may become less frequent, extreme cold spells are believed to persist in the foreseeable future and will likely have profound effects on species distributions, community organization, and ecosystem function. However, generalities about how ecosystems respond to these disturbances remain understudied. In 2008, an extreme once‐in‐50‐year cold spell affected sub‐tropical China, causing catastrophic damage to natural systems within the swath of the disturbance. In this study, we investigated the effects of this disturbance on a community of butterflies in the Nanling Mountain Preserve in southern China. Butterfly count surveys were conducted from 2006 to 2011. We predicted that the 2008 cold spell would have disproportionate effects on tropical butterfly species, increasing community dominance of more broadly tolerant temperate species. Over the course of the study, we counted 3403 butterflies from 249 species. Our results showed that the cold spell reduced abundances of temperate and tropical species by 50% and 88%, respectively. The disproportionate loss of tropical butterfly species changed butterfly community structure, resulting in a post cold spell community nearly completely dominated by temperate species. Butterfly communities remained dominated by temperate species for 2 years before the abundances of tropical species return to predisturbance conditions in 2011. As cold spells change in frequency and intensity in the future, we should expect their role in structuring sub‐tropical communities, in particular, the presence and dominance of tropical species to also change.