数字基础设施建设与发展中国家绿色产品出口

文章利用2008～2019年42个发展中国家出口贸易数据，考察发展中国家数字基础设施建设对绿色产品出口的影响。研究发现，发展中国家数字基础设施建设显著促进了绿色产品出口，并且这种促进作用背后的逻辑在于降低信息成本和推动产业绿色化转型。异质性分析表明，在环境约束力度、知识产权保护强度较高的国家，数字基础设施的促进作用更大；当进口目的地为发达国家(地区)时，数字基础设施的促进作用更大；数字基础设施建设对不同生产阶段绿色产品出口的影响存在差异。进一步基于“宽带中国”试点政策的检验表明数字基础设施建设显著促进中国绿色产品出口，为基本结论提供了外生证据支持。在全球数字化转型浪潮下，文章的研究为发展中国家提高绿色国际竞争力提供一定的思路。     

铁路的长期经济影响:基于中国1980年铁路线的研究

铁路与经济发展之间的关系得到了大量的研究，但均集中于短期经济影响，且很少关注铁路在发展中国家从传统农业社会向工业社会转型过程中的作用。文章使用中国1980年的铁路线研究了铁路在中国转型期对县域经济发展的长期影响。研究发现，铁路开通对县域经济发展具有显著的长期促进作用，具体来说，以2000年数据为例，1980年铁路线对以GDP为衡量指标的经济发展的年均促进作用为1.16%。排除了无法观测因素和溢出效应、控制县级异质性、以及使用"三线建设"作为外生冲击的结果均支持上述结论。机制检验发现，铁路促进了县域层面的工业化，同时还显著增加了县域层面的外商投资和出口，进而促进了经济发展。本文的研究不仅提供了铁路的长期经济影响的经验证据，同时也揭示了以铁路为代表的基础设施对经济转型的作用，从而有助于理解中国经济增长奇迹，也为其他发展中国家转型提供了借鉴。     

数字基础设施降低碳排放的效应研究——基于“宽带中国”战略的准自然实验

在数字经济时代,完善数字基础设施建设释放"数字红利",已经成为实现"碳达峰、碳中和"的重要手段。基于2009—2019年中国287个城市的面板数据,文章以"宽带中国"示范城市政策为切入点,借助双重差分法考察数字基础设施建设对碳排放的影响和作用机制。研究发现,"宽带中国"建设显著降低了城市碳排放,经过一系列稳健性检验后,上述结果依然成立。机制分析发现,数字基础设施建设主要通过促进绿色技术创新降低城市碳排放量。进一步的异质性分析表明,"宽带中国"示范城市建设对碳排放的影响存在区域异质性,从东中西差异来看碳减排效应在东部地区更为显著,从南北差异来看碳减排效应在南部地区更为显著。文章的研究深化了对数字化赋能"双碳"战略的效应、机制和地区差异的理解。     

CEO财务经历与企业创新——基于风险认知和融资能力的双重视角

财务行业是一个具有风险属性和资本属性的特殊行业，财务经历有助于塑造CEO良好的风险认知和融资能力。文章基于烙印理论，以2009-2018年A股上市公司为样本，从"风险认知烙印"和"融资能力烙印"双重视角研究了CEO财务经历对企业创新的影响及其机理。研究发现，CEO财务经历对企业创新有显著的正向影响；在采用PSM-DID、Heckman两阶段模型等控制内生性后，该结论亦成立。具体而言，CEO财务经历主要是通过发展CEO的"风险认知烙印"和"融资能力烙印"两种烙印效应来促进企业创新；CEO财务经历对企业创新的影响在CEO外部薪酬差距更大、CEO持股比例更高的企业中更为明显。文章的研究发现烙印效应可能是解释CEO财务经历影响企业创新的重要机制，这为上市公司制定科学合理的CEO聘任决策提供了相关理论依据。     

政府治理与PPP项目投资:来自发展中国家面板数据的经验分析

文章采用108个发展中国家的面板数据,实证检验了私人部门参与基础设施PPP项目投资意愿与政府治理之间的关系。研究发现,私人投资PPP项目的可能性与投资额都受到政府治理水平的显著影响。随着政府治理的改善,私人部门的投资信心得到提升。这种影响随着经济增速、历史投资额的变化而动态调整。对于不同行业和类型的PPP项目,私人部门的投资信心对政府治理的敏感度存在显著差异。可见,政府推广PPP模式最有效的方法并不是推出相关的规范或规则,而是要从改变自身入手,建立相关监督机制来约束政府行为,建立政府尊重契约、遵守规则的信誉。在积极完善政策环境的基础上,中国政府应着眼于提升自身的治理效率,以达到促进PPP项目推广的最佳效果。     

金融普惠可以提高减贫质量吗?——基于多维贫困的分析

切实提高减贫质量对我国打赢打好脱贫攻坚战和守住脱贫成果至关重要。金融普惠作为当前我国金融改革和脱贫攻坚的重要举措,是否有助于提高减贫质量仍是有待回答的问题。文章基于中国家庭金融调查2015年数据,从多维贫困和多维贫困脆弱性两方面出发研究了金融普惠对我国农村减贫质量的影响。研究发现,金融普惠可以同时降低农村家庭多维贫困和多维贫困脆弱性,并且对多维贫困问题严重的农村家庭有更大的作用;区分不同贫困和不同金融服务发现,金融普惠可以显著降低收入贫困、教育贫困及生活质量贫困,对健康贫困的影响则不显著;银行营业网点与金融服务点渗透、以及储蓄、贷款、保险及数字金融服务使用可以提高减贫质量,而其他金融机构渗透、信用卡使用及银行服务评价的作用相对有限。进一步地,文章研究了金融普惠减贫质量效应的环境条件,发现村庄市场及制度环境和家庭需求环境改善有助于充分发挥金融普惠的积极作用,相反则可能构成一定的制约。最后,文章检验了金融普惠的影响机制,发现促进农村家庭人力与物质资本积累、以及地区经济发展等在其中发挥了重要的中介作用。文章结论为我国提高减贫质量提供了可靠的政策工具,同时也可促进我国全面建成小康社会和经济实现高质量发展。     

参军经历会导致农村青年收入溢价吗?——以CFPS2010调查9628个样本为例

文章基于CFPS2010调查的9628个农村男性数据，研究参军经历对个人收入的影响，并以"家庭成分"作为工具变量去除了内生性问题引起的估计偏误。研究发现：参军经历显著增加了个人收入，在控制其他变量后，农村退伍军人的收入高于没有参军者35.5%。进一步分析表明，（1）农村退伍军人更容易获得城镇就业机会，而城镇就业显著提高了个人收入；（2）农村退伍军人拥有更广泛的社会网络，而社会网络也显著促进了个人收入。因此，文章创新地发现了参军经历通过"城镇就业"和"社会网络"两个中介渠道影响个人收入。     

中国助力老挝减贫研究

老挝是我国西南邻国,也是我国"一带一路"战略重要合作伙伴。中国助力老挝减贫既是承担国际责任,也是促进中老两国政治沟通、民心相通的重要途径。文章首先介绍老挝贫困现状;然后从自然环境、民族、宗教、产业等角度分析导致老挝贫困的原因;其次对老挝减贫过程中的重要问题进行探讨,发现老挝公务员等管理者能力素质低、贫困率发展不平衡、教育区域发展不平衡是制约老挝减贫的主要问题;最后提出中国助力老挝减贫的策略。     

“一带一路”能否助推我国全球价值链攀升——基于基础设施建设的中介效应分析

提升全球价值链地位是新发展格局下畅通国际循环的应有之义，"一带一路"倡议提出已近7年，其对我国全球价值链地位的影响究竟如何仍有待科学论证。文章基于2009-2017年我国30个省市的面板数据，采用双重差分倾向得分匹配法（PSM-DID），考察了"一带一路"倡议的提出对我国全球价值链地位提升的影响，并从传统基础设施建设与新型基础设施建设的双重视角探讨其内在逻辑。研究发现："一带一路"倡议有效提升了我国GVC地位，且政策效应具有滞后性。将基础设施建设纳入多重中介效应模型检验发现，基础设施建设是"一带一路"建设提升GVC地位的重要途径；并且，当前传统基础设施建设对GVC地位的提升力度（1.94%）依然高于新型基础设施建设（0.09%）。进一步，面板门槛回归模型的结果表明基础设施结构具有门槛效应，新基建投资占比超过23.11%以后，其对GVC地位的中介效应才能凸显。实现基础设施的"双轮驱动"作用，需进一步加大对新基建的关注。上述结论对于"一带一路"建设背景下，科学推动基础设施建设，进而促进我国GVC地位提升具有一定的启示意义。     

金融服务开放与制造业企业出口产品质量:影响机制与经验证据

文章从理论上分析了金融服务开放影响制造业企业出口产品质量提升的动态演变过程，并利用2004-2013年中国金融服务进出口和中国工业企业数据对理论推演进行验证。结果表明：金融服务开放显著促进了制造业出口产品质量升级，且金融服务引进来对制造业企业出口产品质量提升的作用略大于金融服务走出去所产生的作用；从不同贸易方式、不同衡量指标、不同企业所有制等方面对此进行检验均证实了金融服务开放对制造业出口产品质量升级的正向作用；影响机制检验和扩展分析显示，创新效应、金融服务"引进来"对"走出去"的推动、垂直专业化效应和本地吸收效应影响着金融开放对企业出口产品质量升级的作用。文章的研究发现有助于为进一步扩大金融服务开放来推动制造业高质量发展提供有价值的政策依据。     

Promoting of Investment in Africa*

Abstract: This paper examines the trend, constraints, promotion, and prospects of investment – domestic investment, foreign direct investment, and private portfolio investment – in Africa. After identifying the importance of investment in Africa's economic development, it was shown that all forms of investment are low in Africa and hence inadequate for the attainment of the MDGs and poverty reduction in the continent. The constraining factors include: low resources mobilization; high degree of uncertainty; poor governance, corruption, and low human capital development; unfavorable regulatory environment and poor infrastructure, small individual country sizes; high dependence on primary commodities exports and increased competition; poor image abroad; shortage of foreign exchange and the burden of huge domestic and external debt; and undeveloped capital markets, their high volatility, and home bias by foreign investors. The paper recommends that successful promotion of both domestic, foreign direct and portfolio investment in Africa will require actions and measures at the national, regional, and international levels. It concludes that the prospects are bright. New and attractive investment opportunities are emerging in infrastructure, particularly as most African countries now encourage public/private partnerships for investments in this sector. In addition to privatization, renewed interest within Africa in undertaking regionally based projects and joint exploitation of natural resources is creating other investment opportunities. Apart from the fact that investment in Africa yields the highest returns, investment risk in the continent is declining. In addition, much progress has been made in recent years to improve the investment climate in Africa. All this is of course is not to deny that obstacles do remain hence economic reforms to enhance domestic investment would need to be complemented by measures to attract increased foreign capital. Critical in such endeavors must be efforts to improve governance in some countries as well as to eliminate socio‐political violence in others and development of domestic capital markets, while government institutions must be modernized and upgraded.     

Do political connections affect corporate poverty alleviation decisions? Evidence from China

Programs to alleviate poverty by corporations are increasingly popular as a new form of corporate social responsibility. This study examines how the political connections of a firm's chairperson are associated with decisions to alleviate poverty based on a sample of listed Chinese firms from 2016 to 2018. We find that the chairperson's political connections increase the probability of participation and the amount of investment in programs to alleviate poverty. This positive relationship is mainly manifested in firms with high agency costs and low regional economic conditions. In addition, the chairperson's political connections are not related to the efficiency of the poverty alleviation program. Politically connected firms receive less government recognition with an increase in investment in poverty alleviation. Our findings are consistent with the notion that firms participate in poverty alleviation programs for reciprocal favor exchanges, but they fail to manage these programs efficiently.     

参与精准扶贫与企业创新——基于外部融资视角的分析

为实现消除农村贫困和区域贫困的目标，在党和国家的号召下，越来越多的上市公司参与到精准扶贫战略中，然而学术界对企业参与精准扶贫经济后果影响的相关研究还有待进一步丰富和拓展。以2016-2018年沪深A股上市公司为样本，文章实证检验了企业参与精准扶贫工作对其创新绩效的影响。研究结果表明，参与精准扶贫显著提高了企业的创新产出和创新效率。在改变变量度量方法、更换模型以及使用安慰剂检验和PSM模型控制内生性问题等一系列稳健性检验后，结论仍然成立。进一步探讨其中的作用机制发现，企业参与精准扶贫通过缓解融资约束进而提升了创新绩效，而资源效应（降低债务融资成本和提高税收优惠）和声誉效应（增加媒体正面报道数量）是参与精准扶贫所发挥的外部融资作用。最后，基于宏观社会层面、中观市场层面以及微观企业层面的异质性分析表明，参与精准扶贫对企业创新的正向影响主要存在于地方扶贫压力较大、资本市场信息环境较差的企业以及非国有企业中。通过理论分析和实证检验，本文不仅丰富了参与精准扶贫和企业创新领域的相关研究，也对充分发挥资本市场在服务国家脱贫攻坚战略中的作用以及深入实施创新驱动发展战略、发挥企业在技术创新中的主体作用具有重要的启示意义。     

Infrastructure and poverty reduction: Assessing the dynamic impact of Chinese infrastructure investment in sub-Saharan Africa

Infrastructure investment is essential for African countries to enhance economic activities and reduce poverty; however, the conclusions from national-level studies remain ambiguous. Combining geo-coded Chinese infrastructure project data from 2000 to 2014 and Demographic and Health Surveys information, we employ a spatiotemporal estimation strategy and explore the dynamic effectiveness of Chinese infrastructure investment on local multidimensional poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and its mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that infrastructure projects can continuously alleviate local multidimensional poverty following project completion, primarily by improving living standards through local industrialization and increasing individual employment stability. Further investigating heterogeneities, we determine that Chinese infrastructure projects are more effective for self-dependent recipients, in rural areas, and when overseen by state-owned enterprises. Our findings provide insights into the long-term effectiveness for underdeveloped countries to reduce local poverty with Chinese infrastructure investment.     

New evidence of the interdependence in the labor-supply behavior of white couples

A logit technique is used to estimate couples' joint probabilities of various labor-force statuses, given their personal characteristics. Conditional probabilities of the labor-force status of spouses are inferred. An analysis of these probabilities suggests that, while spouses appear to be complementary in participation decisions, there is also evidence of substitutability in spouses' work hours, ceteris paribus.     

哈巴河县贫困问题研究

西部与哈萨克斯坦国接壤的哈巴河县是国家级贫困县，贫困直接影响了边疆的安定团结。针对目前扶贫工作的一些不足，提出了生态综合治理、加大基础设施建设投入、重视教育、发展特色经济等一系列对策建议。     

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.     

The Effect of Public Infrastructure on Cost Structure and Performance of Chinese Provinces*

This paper estimates a translog cost function for 29 Chinese provinces between 1979 and 2018. The results imply that investment in public infrastructure reduces costs in all provinces. Comparing the estimated rate of return to infrastructure with the rate of return to private capital, our results indicate underinvestment for the initial period after the economic reforms; however, after 2010 our results show overinvestment in infrastructure. Infrastructure capital is a substitute input to labor, private capital and intermediate inputs. Finally, public infrastructure growth contributes positively to labor and total factor productivity growth, but the effect is small. The growth of private capital and intermediate inputs are the most important factors that boost the growth of labor productivity.     

Do International Remittances Affect Poverty in Africa?*

Abstract: International remittances flowing into developing countries are attracting increasing attention because of their rising volume and their impact on recipient countries. This paper uses a panel data set on poverty and international remittances for African countries to examine the impact of international remittances on poverty reduction in 33 African countries over the period 1990–2005. We find that international remittances—defined as the share of remittances in country GDP—reduce the level, depth, and severity of poverty in Africa. But the size of the poverty reduction depends on how poverty is being measured. After instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international remittances, we find that a 10 percent increase in official international remittances as a share of GDP leads to a 2.9 percent decline in the poverty headcount or the share of people living in poverty. Also, the more sensitive poverty measures—the poverty gap (poverty depth) and squared poverty gap (poverty severity)—suggest that international remittances will have a similar impact on poverty reduction. The point estimates for the poverty gap and squared poverty gap suggest that a 10 percent increase in the share of international remittances will lead to a 2.9 percent and 2.8 percent decline, respectively, in the depth and severity of poverty in African countries. Regardless of the measure of poverty used as the dependent variable, income inequality (Gini index) has a positive and significant coefficient, indicating that greater inequality is associated with higher poverty in African countries, much in conformity with the literature. Similar results were obtained for trade openness. In the same vein, per capita income has a negative and significant effect on each measure of poverty used in the study. Our results also show that inflation rates positively and significantly affect poverty incidence, depth and severity in Africa. In all three poverty measures, the dummy variable for sub‐Saharan Africa is strongly positive, and strongly negative for North Africa. The policy implications of these results are discussed.     

Reviving Foreign Direct Investments in Southern Africa: Constraints and Policies

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to examine the factors that determine the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to SADC member states, which is critical for introducing widespread technological change, complementing domestic investment, improving the agility and competitiveness of firms, and providing access to skills and global markets. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, FDI flows to SADC have improved significantly increasing from an annual average of only $660 million in 1985–95 to about $5.9 billion in 2000–04. A number of countries in the region have taken additional steps to reform their policy stance in order to boost prospects for increased FDI inflows, while South Africa has now become an important growth pole for attracting foreign investment to the region. However, despite the economic and institutional reforms, especially by some of the low‐income countries in the region, the flow of FDI to SADC member states remains low and concentrated in few countries and sectors. The paper identifies a number of factors constraining FDI inflows, including the small size of the regional economy, persistent macroeconomic uncertainty in some important economies, high administrative barriers, inadequate physical infrastructure, weak financial systems, and growing perception of corruption. The paper argues that SADC member states need to strengthen efforts to enhance policy frameworks, both individually and collectively, in order to make the region attractive for foreign investors. More progress is required on improving the efficiency of institutions, macroeconomic policy co‐ordination and harmonization, opening up to trade, strengthening energy, transport and telecommunications infrastructure, putting more resources in developing local skills, reducing bureaucratic red tape and curbing corruption. Importantly, SADC member states should avoid heated competition or “bidding wars” for FDI, where countries seek to outbid each other in offering fiscal and financial subsidies to attract foreign investors. Competition for FDI between neighbouring countries is not only wasteful and costly, but may also weaken regional co‐operation and integration. Co‐operation at a SADC level may therefore help avoid costly bidding wars.