The institutional foundation of China's economic growth

China's economic growth is (undoubtedly, undeniably, unquestionably) regarded as a miracle due to the changes it has brought to the lives of the Chinese as well as to the global economic structure. This paper analyzes China's economic growth from the perspective of institutional reforms. The main argument is that, through the redefinition of property rights, the operation costs of China's planned economy under full public ownership have been reduced dramatically. Human resources have greatly improved in terms of productivity and creativity, thus providing China with competitive advantages in the global market.     

员工持股计划、融资约束与国有企业双元创新产出

在当前中国国有企业因其特殊的产权关系和管理体制而只能获得较低创新产出的背景下,本文从制度创新与技术创新的协同视角出发,在公司治理的理论框架下引入了双元创新的相关研究,从而详细地探讨了国有企业员工持股计划的实施如何通过缓解企业面临的融资约束,进而影响到企业整体创新产出及双元创新产出提升的微观作用机制,并利用2004—2020年中国A股国有上市公司的相关数据进行实证检验后发现,国有企业员工持股计划的实施明显有助于企业整体创新产出和利用式创新产出的提升,而对于企业探索式创新产出的提升却并无显著影响,且具体作用机制与理论分析部分相符,但作用效果却会因企业内部特征的不同及员工持股计划的设计特征差异而具有明显区别。由此,应该积极推进国有企业以多种方式开展员工持股计划,特别要在高技术型和高学历员工占比较高的国有企业中优先实施员工持股计划,并进一步优化持股计划的方案设计,从而更好地发挥出各类员工在企业创新活动中的主体作用。     

A reconsideration of the problem of social cost: Free riders and monopolists

Summary. One version of the Coase Theorem is, If property rights are fully allocated, competition leads to efficient allocations. This version implies that the public goods problem can be solved by allocating property rights fully. We show that this mechanism is not likely to work well in economies with global externalities because the privatized economy is highly susceptible to strategic behavior: The free-rider problem manifests itself as a complementary monopoly problem in an associated private goods economy. Thus, our work relates the validity of the Coase Theorem to the literature on the incentives for strategic behavior in economies with complementarities. Received: 12 May 1999; revised version: 9 July 1999     

A great wall of patents: What is behind China's recent patent explosion?

China's patent surge, documented in this paper, is seemingly paradoxical given the country's weak record of protecting intellectual property rights. Using a firm-level data set that spans the population of China's large and medium-size industrial enterprises, this paper explores the factors that account for China's rising patent activity. While the intensification of research and development in the Chinese economy tracks with patenting activity, it explains only a fraction of the patent explosion. The growth of foreign direct investment in China is prompting Chinese firms to file for more patent applications. Amendments to the patent law that favor patent holders and ownership reform that has clarified the assignment of property rights also emerge as significant sources of China's patent boom. These results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over-dispersion in the patent counts data and firm heterogeneity.     

DOES MARKET‐ORIENTED ECONOMIC TRANSITION ENHANCE ENTERPRISE PRODUCTIVITY? EVIDENCE FROM CHINA'S ENTERPRISES

Using a panel of China's enterprises from 1999 to 2007, this paper examined how market‐oriented economic transition affects the productivity of China's enterprises given the various stages of enterprises in the commercialization process and given the market segmentation among Chinese different regions. The main findings are that: (i) enterprises with higher degrees of commercialization have relatively higher productivity, whereas enterprises with higher degrees of market segmentation have relatively lower productivity; (ii) the commercialization process and market segmentation act indirectly affect productivity through enterprises' capacity to export, innovate and obtain business loans; and (iii) the indirect effects are found to be significantly different between the commercialization process and market segmentation, highlighting the effects of the market‐oriented economic transition on enterprises' productivity. This paper provides reliable enterprise‐level evidence regarding the sources and evolution of enterprise productivity during different stages of market‐oriented economic transition in China.     

Technical Efficiency in China’s Iron and Steel Industry: Evidence from the new census data

A stochastic frontier production function is estimated using data from the 1995 industrial census to measure the technical efficiency of China's large and medium-sized iron and steel enterprises. The technical efficiency estimates are examined and compared for different enterprise groups distinguished by their ownership, size, capital vintage and location. The sources of diverse performance of China's iron and steel enterprises are identified and discussed with an emphasis on policy implications.     

Farmer Brown v. Rancher Wyatt: Teaching the Coase Theorem

The Coase Theorem is a fundamental tenet of environmental economics and is taught to thousands of principles of microeconomics students each year. Its counterintuitive conclusion, that a Pareto optimal solution can result between private parties regardless of the initial allocation of property rights over a scarce resource, is difficult for students to understand. By using a mock trial that centers on a property dispute, students can be taught how the Coase Theorem works in practice with minimal preparation. The strong assumptions on which the Coase Theorem relies also can be included to show why the theorem may not hold. By using a unique, active learning technique, students will be more engaged and may have a better understanding of a difficult but seminal theory of economics.     

The Emergence of Market Power in Emission Rights Markets: The Role of Initial Permit Distribution

This paper offers an analytical model of emission permit markets in which a large number of regulated emitters participate, and derives formulae that estimate the degree of market distortion. These formulae clearly show the entire dependence of the ratio of market prices to competitive levels on the permit initial distribution as well as the existence of a threshold for effective market power. While the findings challenge a well-known conception of the Coase Theorem, they have significant policy implications vis-à-vis the Kyoto Protocol and the related policy debates on excess emission rights known as hot air.     

Modeling of the impact of the financial crisis and China's accession to WTO on China's exports to Germany

We focus on discussing the impact of China's accession to WTO and the financial crisis on China's exports to Germany, particularly in agricultural products, based on some most recent proposals. Firstly, structural breaks caused by those events are detected. Then the Box–Cox model and a new tree-form Constant Market Share (CMS) model are fitted to discover the long-term impact of those events on the trade relationship between China and Germany and the growth causes of China's exports to Germany. We found that China's accession to WTO had a negative short-term impact on China's exports and its market share in agricultural products, but a positive short-term impact on its market share in industrial products and a positive long-term impact on its exports and market share in both classes. The tree-form CMS model shows the growth of China's exports to Germany due to competitiveness after this event was much higher than before. The financial crisis exhibited a negative short-term impact on China's exports to Germany, but a positive short-term impact on China's market share and the trade relationship between both countries in industrial products. China's market share in agricultural products was not affected by the financial crisis.     

Firm ownership,industrial structure,and regional innovation performance in China's provinces

This paper uses panel data between 2000 and 2010 to explore how firm ownership and regional industrial structures contribute to regional innovation performance in Chinese provinces. Specifically, we explore how the extent of specialisation and diversification in regional industrial structures at the province level fosters both Marshall–Arrow–Romer and Jacobs spillovers, as well as how foreign and state ownership influence regional innovation. We find: (i) China's regional innovation systems benefit from Jacobs but not MAR externalities, with the former spurring higher quality innovation in the form of increased invention patenting; (ii) state-owned enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises advance local innovation, with the latter again fostering higher quality innovation; and (iii) a convergence towards a combination of low specialisation and high diversity in provincial industrial structure is taking place between China's more developed inland coastal provinces and less developed inland provinces. Implications and suggestions for policy-making and future research are discussed.     

Capital Structure Premium in Multinational SOEs: Evidence from China

We investigate the relationship among multinational operations, ownership and capital structure using data from China's A‐share listed companies. We find that, in general, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have lower leverages than domestic enterprises (DEs). More importantly, we document a capital structure premium in China's multinational state‐owned enterprises (SOEs). Since the state supports multinational SOEs that promote overseas national strategy, these multinational SOEs will have higher credit availability and therefore higher debt–equity ratios. This study sheds light on the Chinese government's impact on firm's creditability.     

科斯产权理论的适用范围与土地产权理论的发展

科斯提出,只要财产权是明确的,并且交易成本为零或者很小,那么,无论在开始时将财产权赋予谁,市场均衡的最终结果都是有效率的。科斯的产权理论对于优化资源配置、完善产权制度具有重要意义,但其对于土地这一不一定具有可替代性的资产,并不完全适用。通过实例定性分析科斯产权理论的局限性和适用范围,阐述土地产权位移理论提出的背景,为土地产权理论的进一步发展提供可借鉴的参考。     

The nature of Coasean property

The Coase Theorem is widely regarded as pointing to the importance of positive transaction costs for the analysis of economic institutions. Various interpretations of the Coase Theorem regard transaction costs as some set of impediments to contracting, or more broadly, as the costs of providing institutional solutions to conflicts over resource use. The abstract nature of the Coasean hypothetical tends to promote an abstract notion of property as a thin entitlement: a right in a designated person to take certain actions or derive value from a set of resource attributes. On this view, property is like a collection of tiny contracts. The property rights furnished by actual property law are much more coarse grained than this, and property is correspondingly “incomplete” for transaction costs reasons. Property and contract are substitutes in some situations, but they often are not interchangeable—because of Coasean transaction costs.     

ECONOMIC INTERACTIONS: CHINA VIS-A-VIS HONG KONG

Hong Kong's role has been integral to China's unprecedented economic growth, but privatization ranks first in importance. Another key factor is Beijing's putting economic reform before political reform. Giving democracy to a society in chaos likely makes matters worse. Hong Kong and China both have profited from their partnership. As China has opened up to allow transformation into a market economy, Hong Kong has provided informational impetus for change, a capitalist model to copy, and middleman functions for China to participate in outside-world goods and financial markets. The collapse of Communism in China and elsewhere has increased the supply of cheap labour perhaps by 2 billion. Manufacturing countries with expensive labour and high cost welfare programmes—such as those in the United States, Canada, and Europe—will have difficulty. Capitalists in these countries will do well by investing abroad but not in their own countries. Though wrong in detail, the factor price equalization theorem—that international movement of goods and international movement of factors of production are equivalent—basically is correct. If China continues moving toward privatisation and joining the international community, it will become fiercely competitive, and prospects will be bright for both China and Hong Kong. However, China's recent drift from capitalism clouds those prospects. Fundamentally, three kinds of rights systems exist: (i) a capitalist system, with well defined private property rights, protected by law, where control of resources is based on ownership; (ii) a hierarchical system, such as Communism, where control of resources is based on one's rank in the hierarchy; (iii) a system of corruption, where control of resources is based on bribes and patronage. China rapidly had been making a transition from the second system to the first but recently seems to have derailed into the third. In any case, Communism's collapse is one of the great events in human history. The hero of that event is Deng Xiaoping—not Gorbachev, nor Thatcher, nor Reagan. Hong Kong, by contributing significantly to China's capitalist movement, has led the Communist world to change.     

Hold-up and externality: the firm as a nexus of incomplete rights?

The Coasean theory of the firm (Coase in Economica 4:386–405, 1937) has flourished with the theory of incomplete contracts. Transaction costs in the form of enforcement costs have been deemed to be the main determinants of the decision to ‘make’ versus ‘buy’. Surprisingly, this stream of literature has almost neglected that transaction costs may also generate incomplete property rights (Coase in J Law Econ 3:1–44, 1960). As firm’s activities entail both contractual and property rights, these two domains interfere each other on the decision to carry out a transaction within the firm. When property rights are incomplete, potential externalities may increase the cost of using the price mechanism to procure the assets needed in a given transaction. The resulting ‘Coasean firm’ would not only centralize incomplete contracts under a unified governance system, but it will also aggregate incomplete property rights under a unified ownership structure.     

The effects of trade,aid, and investment on China's image in Latin America

Using repeated cross-sectional survey data, we analyze whether China's growing economic engagement in Latin America has an effect on citizens’ perceptions of China within 18 Latin American countries over the 2002–2013 period. Our instrumental-variables regressions exploit exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese exports, aid, and investment. Specifically, we use China's market penetration of developing countries outside of Latin America as the instrumental variable. In contrast to the widespread criticism, we do not find evidence that China's growing economic activities in the respective countries diminish average attitudes towards China—neither at the national nor at the provincial level. However, China's economic engagement appears to contribute to more polarized opinions on China: more individuals develop either very positive or very negative opinions on China. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that China's economic engagement creates winners and losers.     

财政透明度对企业产能过剩的影响研究——基于"主观"与"被动"投资偏误的视角

文章把地方政府的财政透明度纳入企业微观行为的分析体系,根据《2012年中国市级政府财政透明度研究报告》和《2012年世界银行中国企业调查数据》等统计资料,实证检验了财政透明度对企业产能过剩的两种影响机制——企业"主观"投资偏误形成机理和"被动"投资偏误形成机理.研究发现:(1)财政透明度的提高会增加企业对政府行为的理性预期,减少其对外部经营环境的不确定性判断,抑制了企业由于"主观"投资偏误而导致的产能利用率低下、产能过剩现象;(2)财政透明度的提高增加了政府干预土地要素市场的成本,继而减少了企业因政府干预土地要素市场而产生的"被动"投资偏误,产能利用率提高.     

Understanding china's economic performance

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978: the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. Specifically, the resulting non-capitalist institutions are claimed to be successful in (a) agriculture where land is not owned by the fanners; (b) township and village enterprises (TVEs) which are owned collectively by rural communities; and (c) state owned enterprises (SOEs) where increased competition and increased wage incentive, but not privatization, have been emphasized.

The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation for the rapid growth. China had a high population density heavily concentrated in low-wage agriculture, a condition that was favorable for labor-intensive export-led growth in other parts of East Asia. The convergence school also holds that China's gradualism results primarily from a lack of consensus over the proper course, with power still divided between market reformers and old-style socialists; and that the “innovative” non-capitalist institutions are responses to China's political circumstances and not to its economic circumstances.

Perhaps the best test of the two approaches is whether China's policy choices are in fact leading to institutions harmonized with normal market economies or to more distinctive innovations. In this regard, the recent policy trend has been towards institutional harmonization rather than institutional innovation, suggesting that the government accepts that the ingredients for a dynamic market economy are already well-known.     

社会资本规制与产权安排的替代效用和替代规则

按照科斯定理的逻辑,可以证明社会资本规制与产权安排具有相互替代的效用;而两者之间的替代规则,可以在交易成本理论的平台上,从交易的频率、专用性、异质性三个维度进行刻画;对于现实中的社会资本规制和产权安排的互补现象,也可以通过交易成本递增和外部性分析,在满足两者效用替代的基础上得到解释。     

经济政策不确定性对企业创新持续性的影响——基于非线性视角的实证分析

创新是经济发展的动力之源，而创新持续性则是企业保持竞争优势的关键。本文以2009—2020年A股上市公司为样本，探究经济政策不确定性对企业创新持续性的影响。研究发现：经济政策不确定与企业创新持续性之间具有“U型”非线性关系，且研发投入在其中发挥部分中介作用。进一步研究发现：经济政策不确定性对企业创新持续性的“U型”非线性影响在不同区位因素及知识产权保护力度差异下表现出异质性；多个大股东持股及较为宽松的货币政策能够缓解经济政策不确定性对企业创新持续性的“U型”影响。故政府在采用宏观经济政策调控经济发展时要谨慎把握政策调控的尺度，进一步完善我国多层次的资本市场体系，从而不断提升企业的创新持续性水平，推动我国经济的高质量发展。