Di Jiang

Nationality: China

Year of entry: 2014

Background

Di has a Bachelor degree in Economics, specialising in International Economics and Trade. She achieved her MSc degree with the Urban Economic Development (UED) programme at DPU, where she also has worked as the Graduate Teaching Assistant for three years since 2012.

Di’s current research project intends to understand how urban housing inequalities in contemporary China has evolved in the past thirty years, in the backdrop of a series of socialist market-oriented reform in both the national economic system and urban housing policies. By doing so, her research aims to explain how the changing housing inequalities has translated to economic inequalities among urban households, a process influenced by a set of factors in China's political economy, and the changing role of housing in terms of wealth creation in such context. This research is largely motivated by her interest in the relationship between economic inequality and the role of the state in China, and its manifestation in a rapid urban development era. Di hopes to study the salient issues in China’s intensive urbanisation process and their socio-economic consequences in order to provide insightful answers to the challenges on China’s sustainable economic prosperity and political stability.

Di’s past research experience included individual work and semi-applied projects with the public sector and independent research bodies. Her past research can fall into the domains of urban economic development, urban economic policies, urban regeneration & transportation, and poverty reduction. From 2007 to 2009, she has also worked in a research project in China on environmental economics, fully-funded by the Ministry of Education, and produced three co-published journal articles on the empirical studies on the regional comparison of the relations between economic growth and environmental degradation in contemporary China.

Key Topics: housing inequality, housing reform, market transition, urbanisation

Languages: English, Mandarin Chinese

Publications and other work

Working Paper

Jiang, D. 2013. “Relations between Economic Inequality and Political Dynamics in Contemporary China – an urban development planning perspective with evidence from the housing sector”, DPU Working Paper No.148, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.

Journal Articles

Huang, Y., Wang, L., Li, G., Jiang, D., 2009. “An Empirical Analysis for the Environmental Kuznets Curve in China Based on Spatial Panel Models”, South China Journal of Economics, 2009-10, pp. 59-68.

Wang, L., Zou, W., Huang, Y., Jiang, D. 2009. “An Empirical Study on the Environmental Kuznets Curve in Eastern China”, Humanities and Social Sciences Journal of Hainan University, 2009-1, pp. 57-62.

Li, G., Huang, Y., Jiang, D. 2008. “An Empirical Test of Economic Growth and Environmental Quality Evolution of Guangxi Province”, Northwest Population Journal, 2008-6, pp. 54-58.