China Rightto Set Lower Growth Target

THE reduction of China’s 2012 growth target to 7.5 percent from the eight percent of recent years headlined the international media coverage of PremierWen Jiabao’s report to the National People’s Congress. The announcement was greeted with fallson international stock markets - simultaneously reflecting China’s economic weight and a misanalysis by international markets. But the lowered target,which is justified by the global economic situation,is only the tip of the iceberg of complex short- and long-term challenges China is facing in its economic policy.     

THE ROLE OF CRIME IN HOUSING UNIT RACIAL/ETHNIC TRANSITION*

Previous research frequently has observed a positive cross-sectional relationship between racial/ethnic minorities and crime and generally has posited that this relationship is entirely because of the effect of minorities on neighborhood crime rates. This study posits that at least some of this relationship might be a result of the opposite effect—neighborhood crime increases the number of racial/ethnic minorities. This study employs a unique sample (the American Housing Survey neighborhood sample) focusing on housing units nested in microneighborhoods across three waves from 1985 to 1993. This format allows one to test and find that such racial/ethnic transformation occurs because of the following effects: First, White households that perceive more crime in the neighborhood or that live in microneighborhoods with more commonly perceived crime are more likely to move out of such neighborhoods. Second, Whites are significantly less likely to move into a housing unit in a microneighborhood with more commonly perceived crime. And third, African American and Latino households are more likely to move into such units.     

EXPLAINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY*

Most criminological theories predict an inverse relationship between employment and crime, but teenagers' involvement in paid work during the school year is correlated positively with delinquency and substance use. Whether the work–delinquency association is causal or spurious has been debated for a long time. This study estimates the effect of paid work on juvenile delinquency using longitudinal data from the national Monitoring the Future project. We address issues of spuriousness by using a two-level hierarchical model to estimate the relationships of within-individual changes in juvenile delinquency and substance use to those in paid work and other explanatory variables. We also disentangle the effects of actual employment from the preferences for employment to provide insight about the likely role of time-varying selection factors tied to employment, delinquency, school engagement, and leisure activities. Whereas causal effects of employment would produce differences based on whether and how many hours respondents worked, we found significantly higher rates of crime and substance use among nonemployed youth who preferred intensive versus moderate work. Our findings suggest the relationship between high-intensity work and delinquency results from preexisting factors that lead youth to desire varying levels of employment.     

China Is Winning the New Global Industrial Contest

THE international financial crisis brought about a radical change in the structure of international industrial competition.That China is winning the new industrial race is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the pattern of industrial expansion and contraction in the major industrial centers over the five years since the beginning of the 2008 international financial crisis. China’s position among industrial centers isn’t inherently obvious from a glance at yearly data.To fully gauge changes in the industrial competition landscape,it’s best to look longerterm.Below,the first chart shows changes in