Industrial Structural Change and Economic Growth in China, 1987–2008

The present paper studies the sources of economic growth and the nature of structural change in the Chinese economy from 1987 to 2008. Using a methodology that evaluates the contribution of an industry to economic growth, the present paper shows that the post‐2000 subperiod marked an increased reliance on the services sector as a source of growth in the Chinese economy. Much of the acceleration in real GDP or aggregate labor productivity growth in China in the post‐2000 subperiod compared to the pre‐2000 period can be traced to an increased contribution from service‐producing and high‐technology exporting manufacturing industries. The evidence indicates that the Chinese economy has been rebalancing toward domestic consumption and shifting its export sector toward high‐technology manufacturing industries.     

Industrial structure change and economic growth: A China-Russia comparison

This paper examines the sources of economic growth and the nature of industrial structure change in China over the past decade, with a comparison to those in Russia. It shows that over the observation period between 1995 and 2008, the Chinese economy was concentrated relatively more in the manufacturing sector and relatively less in the service sector than the Russian economy. In addition, this paper finds that the higher economic growth rate in real GDP and aggregate labour productivity growth between 1996 and 2008 in China than in Russia was broadly based, with most industries contributing to China's better performance. Furthermore, it reveals that the acceleration in economic growth in China in 2003–2008 over 1996–2002 was mainly traced to an increased contribution from the manufacturing sector and to a lesser degree the service sector, while in Russia, it was the service sector, followed by the primary sector driven by the mining and oil and gas extraction industry. These results suggest that the Chinese and Russian economies complement each other, which bodes well for further economic cooperation and trade between the two countries.     

Unemployment: The role of the public sector in increasing the labour absorption capacity of the South African economy

The critical proportions of unemployment and the mainly structural nature of the problem necessitate a re‐evaluation of policy measures in order to foster a pro‐poor growth and development process in South Africa. The propblem could be addressed by implementing an integrated and comprehensive policy package. The public sector expenditure programme is a potent policy measure for stimulating employment growth in the economy. It is argued that a restructuring rather than an expansion of the public sector expenditure programme can result in short‐term, enduring employment effects. The restructured public sector expenditure programme should include characteristics of special employment programmes, focusing on the procurement and provision of more labour‐intensive goods and services and a reorientation of expenditure programmes in favour of the unemployed and the poor.     

Haste Makes Waste: Policy Options Facing China after Reaching the Lewis Turning Point

This paper provides a framework for assessing the health of China's macro economy and the sustainability of economic growth by combining supply‐side and demand‐side factors and by considering their relationship at different stages of development. As the Chinese economy passed through its Lewis turning point, weakened supply‐side factors caused its growth to slow. The increasing concern regarding the economic slowdown has induced both the central and local governments to implement various stimulus plans through instruments of macroeconomic, industrial and regional policies. By examining where the imbalances of the Chinese economy really lie and investigating the determinants of the current slowdown and of the enhancement of the potential growth rate, the present paper suggests that the best path of action for the Chinese Government is not to stimulate growth through demand‐side factors but to increase the potential growth rate through reforms in certain key areas.     

Has China's Housing Production Peaked?

China's real estate has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the COVID‐19 shock, a decades‐long housing boom had given rise to severe price misalignments and regional supply–demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and inevitable. We make use of newly available and updated data sources to analyze supply–demand conditions in the fast‐moving Chinese economy. The imbalances are then compared to benchmarks from other economies. We conclude that the real estate sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggregate growth shock, such as COVID‐19 might pose. In our baseline calibration, using input–output tables and taking account of the very large footprint of housing construction and real estate related sectors, the adjustment to a decline in housing activity can easily trim a cumulative 5–10 percent from the level of output over a period of years.     

The changing role of agriculture with economic structural change – The case of China

We analyze the implication of structural change to the evolving role of agriculture using China as an example. By combining a growth decomposition exercise with Input-Output (IO) and CGE model analyses using China's seven input-output tables (IOTs) in 1987–2017, the evolving role of the agriculture is quantitatively measured. The growth decomposition analysis shows that between 1978 and 2017, China doubled the size of its total labor force, while the absolute number of agricultural workers falls in this period. Rising labor productivity in agriculture has led to rapid agricultural growth without increasing agricultural employment, allowing agriculture to indirectly contribute to the economywide productivity growth through structural change.The measurement of economic integration using an IO approach helps to explain why China's rapid structural change has been accompanied by similar rapid productivity growth within each sector. The general equilibrium effect of structural change on the evolving role of agriculture is further assessed using two CGE models representing the initial (1987) and end (2017) years of a period of 30 years. Similar agricultural productivity shock induces a smaller economywide gain in 2017 than in 1987 in the CGE models, while the gap in the general equilibrium gain between these two years is much smaller than the difference in agriculture's size of the economy in the two years because of stronger linkages between agriculture and the rest of the economy in 2017. About 0.5 unit additional nonagricultural value-added is associated with a unit agricultural value-added increase in 1987, while additional gains in nonagricultural value-added rise to 2.7 unit in 2017.Our analysis of economic integration and implication of structural change to the evolving role of agriculture emphasizes the supply side role for sustainable growth in which agriculture continues to play an important but different role from the past when the demand side effects were stronger. Policies to strengthen supply side linkages have been emphasized in the recent years in China. Exploring further integration between agriculture and the rest of the economy should be part of the new growth strategy.     

Promoting Private Entrepreneurship for Deepening Market Reform in China: A Resource Allocation Perspective

After more than three decades of rapid growth, China's economy is going through an important turning point, where structural imbalances in both supply and demand sides must be addressed for a more moderate and sustainable growth path. By focusing on the structural changes to its ownership, a central element in China's economic transformation under market reform, the present paper highlights the importance of private entrepreneurship in deepening market reform and, thereby, in driving economic growth in a more efficient and sustainable way. Based on a perspective of resource allocation and a conceptual framework of entrepreneurship, the paper elaborates on the evolution of the private sector and its performance in the context of ownership reform, making comparisons with the performance of the state sector. The analysis suggests that there is further room for more productive use of economic resources, especially capital, land and natural resources, by increasing the participation of private entrepreneurs in industries with high entry barriers in favor of state‐owned enterprises. Moreover, more competitive and equal access to productive resources through reform is needed to promote more productive entrepreneurship and to reduce rent‐seeking activities.     

Domestic value added and employment generated by Chinese exports: A quantitative estimation

We develop an input–output methodology to estimate how Chinese exports affected the country's total domestic value added (DVA) and employment in the years 2002 and 2007. For every US$1000 dollar of Chinese exports in 2007 (2002), DVA and employment are estimated to be US$591 (US$466) and 0.096 (0.242) person-year, respectively. To implement these estimations, we use hitherto unpublished Chinese government data to construct several completely new datasets, including an input–output table with separate input–output and employment-output coefficients for processing exports, non-processing exports, and output for domestic use. We hypothesize that, in comparison with the export sector, China's domestic sector would be relatively autarkic due to China's history of central planning. We expect that exports would generate less DVA and employment than output for domestic use. Processing exports, which are highly dependent on imported inputs, would similarly generate less DVA and employment than non-processing exports. Our findings support these expectations. For both 2002 and 2007, the DVA and employment effects of domestic final demand were higher than those of non-processing exports, which were in turn higher than those of processing exports. However, with the progress of economic reforms, we found that the total DVAs of exports and domestic final demand have converged from 2002 to 2007.     

Effects of China's Structural Change on the Exports of East Asian Economies

The Chinese economy is slowing down and is in the midst of a structural transformation from export‐led and investment‐led growth to domestic demand‐led and consumption‐led growth. While there are widespread concerns among China's trading partners about the effect of the slowdown in China's growth on their exports, China's structural changes are also likely to have a significant impact: for example, China will import fewer machines and more cosmetics. The central objective of the present paper is to empirically examine the effect of China's structural transformation on the exports of East Asian economies, which have close trade linkages with China. We find that economies that have failed to increase the share of consumption goods in their exports to China have suffered larger declines in their quantities of exports to China. In addition, economies that have suffered losses in their shares of China's parts and components imports have faced reductions in their shares in China's total imports.     

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF MANUFACTURING AND SERVICES TO EMPLOYMENT CREATION AND GROWTH IN SOUTH AFRICA

This study examines the linkages between the manufacturing and services sectors, and between each of them and the rest of the domestic economy, based on analysis of input-output tables and employment trends. This reveals that manufacturing is particularly important as a source of demand for the services sector as well as the rest of the economy through its strong backward linkages, which suggests that in this respect a decline in manufacturing could negatively affect future growth. Services are especially important in terms of employment creation, both direct and indirect.     

An Examination of Labor Productivity Growth and Structural Changes in the Singapore Labor Force*

This paper ?rst examines the sources of growth in the Singapore economy by decomposing real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth into two components. It is found that, for the period 1974–1999, labor productivity was a signi?cant source of economic growth in Singapore. Conversely, the contribution of the rate of change in employment ratio was only of secondary importance. On further decomposition, the rate of change in employment ratio was due mainly to rate of change in population age‐structure ratio and rate of change in labor‐force participation rate. Growth patterns of the labor force were examined after it has been segregated according to gender, citizenship and age group independently. Labor productivity growth was highest in the transport, storage and communication sector, while labor productivity growth was lowest in the ?nancial, insurance, real estate and business services sector.     

Baumol,Engel, and beyond: accounting for a century of structural transformation in Japan, 1885–1985†

This article examines the drivers of the long‐run structural transformation in Japan. It uses a dynamic input–output framework that decomposes the reallocation of the total output across sectors into two components: the demand side and the supply side, or technological change. To perform this task, we employ 13 seven‐sector input–output tables spanning 100 years (1885 to 1985). The results show that the demand‐side factors, as a combination of the Baumol and Engel effects, were the key explanatory factors in more than 60 per cent of the sector‐period cases in the pre‐Second World War period, while the supply‐side effect drove structural transformation in more than 75 per cent of such cases in the post‐Second World War period. Detailed decomposition results suggest that in most of the sectors, changes in private consumption were the dominant force behind the demand‐side explanations. The demand effect was found to be strongest in the commerce and services sector, which contributed to the rapid growth of GDP in Japan throughout the twentieth century.     

Supply‐leading versus Demand‐following Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence from Three SSA Countries

Abstract: This study investigates empirically the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth in three sub‐Saharan African countries — Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. The study seeks to answer one critical question: Does financial development in sub‐Saharan African countries exhibit a supply‐leading or demand‐following response? Using three proxies of financial development against real GDP per capita (a proxy for economic growth), the study finds that the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth is sensitive to the choice of measurement for financial development. In addition, the strength and clarity of the causality evidence is found to vary from country to country and over time. On balance, a demand‐following response is found to be stronger in Kenya and South Africa, whilst in Tanzania a supply‐leading response is found to be dominant. The study therefore recommends that for Kenya and South Africa the real sector of the economy should be developed further in order to sustain the development of the financial sector. However, for Tanzania, there is need for further development of the financial sector in order to make the economy more monetized.     

An Input–Output Analysis of the Philippine BPO Industry

This paper provides a profile of the Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, makes comparisons with India and other BPO providers, and summarises the results of an input−output analysis of the Philippine BPO industry's inter-sectoral linkages and its potential impact on compensation and employment. The input−output analysis shows that the BPO industry is not a key sector in terms of stimulating production in other sectors of the Philippine economy. Growth in the sector's revenues, however, can have a significant impact on compensation and employment. If appropriate policies are enacted and human capital improved, it is estimated that the Philippine BPO sector may become an important employment-generating sector.     

脱实向虚、企业家劳动异质与供给侧结构性改革

融合劳动价值论和新熊彼特增长理论,考虑需求结构升级、企业家劳动异质、经济增长导向三大假设,构建多部门新熊彼特增长模型,并运用31个省份1993—2018年的面板数据进行实证分析,发现“脱实向虚”对经济增长的影响机理是:“脱实向虚”引致企业家创新性劳动减少,生产率参数受阻,经济增长率下降。这使得新古典框架下“从资本向全要素生产率升级的创新性劳动偏向型道路”可能转向“从资本向投机演变的投机性交易劳动偏向型道路”,出现供给侧结构性失衡。只有优先解决“脱实向虚”带来的供给侧结构性失衡,才能回归供给侧的正常资源配置结构,因此,中国供给侧结构性改革的路径不能简单仿效西方进行管制放松或自由化,而应先运用政府之手,构建现代化经济体系,将投机性交易劳动关进“笼子”;进而运用市场之手,优化资源配置,释放创新性劳动的活力。     

China＇s Economy in 2007/2008： Coping with Problems of Runaway Growth

Fuelled by high domestic investment and rapid export expansion, China ＂s economy grew by ll.4 pereent in 2007, the highest increase since 1994 and the fifth eonseeutive year of double-digit growth. Such spectacular growth performance is unprecedented in the world＇s economic history. However, the Chinese Government is again worried about a possible ＂hard landing＂for the economy, as no economy can sustain very strong growth for extremely long period without overheating. Cracks in China ＂s economy are indeed emerging. The eonsumer priee index shot up to 6.9percent in November 2007, the highest level in a decade, with the annual inflation for 2007 rising to 4.S pereent, well above the government＇s ＂comfort level＂ of 3 percent. This prompted China＇s top leadership to declare that reducing economic overheating and curbing inflation would be the top poliey priorities for 2008. To contain such cost-push inflation, the government has to tackle its root causes, such as excessive liquidity, which is caused by the undervaluation of the renminbi, which in turn is attributable to China＇s chronic external and internal maeroeeonomie imbalances~ High growth is likely to continue in 2008, at around l O pereent, with inflation of S-6 pereent expected, despite the anticipated tighter maeroeeonomie control measures and the more troubled external economic environment （e.g. the expected US economic slowdown）. Regardless, China ＂s fundamental problems associated with runaway growth will largely remain. In addition, if the US economy slips into a serious recession, the Chinese economy will not be able to deeouple from it and escape unscathed.     

Does the Private Sector Help or Hurt the Environment? Evidence from Carbon Dioxide Pollution in Developing Countries

How does the nature of enterprise ownership affect the environment in an economy? Conventional wisdom and theoretical conjectures are split on this important question. In this paper we estimate a reduced-form, random-effects model using data from 44 developing countries over nine years (1987–95) to study for any systematic empirical relationship between the relative level of private sector involvement in an economy and the environmental performance of the economy in terms of its emission of industrial carbon dioxide. We control for both observed and unobserved crosscountry heterogeneity along various institutional and structural dimensions such as the scope of financial market, industrial sector composition and level of foreign direct investment. The regression results indicate that the higher the degree of private sector involvement in a developing economy, the lower is its environmental degradation. In addition, its environmental degradation is likely to be further reduced in presence of a well-functioning domestic capital market and through increased participation by developed economies in its private sector development.     

中国产业结构变化对经济增长的影响分析

在现代市场经济条件下,经济增长主要取决于劳动力、资金、技术等各种资源的有效配置。这些要素在部门之间的流动所产生的效益很大程度上取决于产业之间的技术转换水平和结构状态。因此产业结构演变与经济增长具有内在的联系。本文旨在研究近年来我国产业结构的变化及这一变化对我国经济增长的影响,并对改善产业结构提出政策建议。     

State advances and private retreats? — Evidence of aggregate productivity decomposition in China

This paper is motivated by the recent debate on the existence and scale of China's ‘Guo Jin Min Tui’ phenomenon, which is often translated as ‘the state sector advances and the private sector retreats’. We argue that the profound implication of an advancing state sector is not the size expansion of the state ownership in the economy per se, but the likely retardation of the development of the already financially constrained private sector and the issues around the sustainability of the already weakening Chinese economy growth. Drawing on recent methodological advances, we provide a critical analysis of the contributions of the state and non-state sectors in the aggregate Total Factor Productivity and its growth over the period of 1998–2007 to verify the existence of GJMT and its possible impacts on Chinese economic growth. Overall, we find strong and consistent evidence of a systematic and worsening resource misallocation within the state sector and/or between the state sectors and private sectors over time. This suggests that non-market forces allow resources to be driven away from their competitive market allocation and towards the inefficient state sector.     

Tracing the regional dual value chains: Measurement on the production position and evidence from China

When there is insufficient internal and external impetus for developing countries’ economy, building a domestic and international dual circulation is conducive to promoting the regional industrial growth. On the basis of regional embedded international input-output tables, this paper extends the measurement framework of production position and proposes the concept of the dual value chain, which measure production position that unifies the national and global value chains from forward and backward industrial linkages. We decompose the national and global value chains into three categories and investigate the production position characteristics of China with a multi-dimensional perspective. Consistent evidence shows that a feasible path of technological progress in optimizing the production in value chains in which technological progress plays a crucial role on the pure national value chain across the high-tech manufacturing sector, the eastern and central regions. Their posterior probabilities are 0.96, 0.21and 0.86, respectively. Moreover, the impact on the dual production is nonnegligible that the posterior probability of technological progress on the eastern and central regions is 0.40 and 0.92. In addition, the impact of the Chinese economic stimulus program and technological progress on the economic crisis has a certain moderating effect. Our proposed evaluation framework sheds new light that national value chain production can boost economic growth，and further promote the coordinated of regional industries for developing countries.