Financial Intermediation Development and Economic Growth： Does the Chinese Counterexample Exist？

In terms of the degree-of-freedom of bank loan decision-making, the ratio of loans of private enterprises and individuals to total loans is used to measure the development of China ＇s financial intermediation. Applying generalized method of moments estimation developed for dynamic panel data models, the present paper finds that the effect of financial intermediation development on economic growth is positive and statistieally significant when controlling for other variables, such as human capital foreign direct investment, securitization and foreign trade. The empirical results indicate that the concept of the so-called Chinese counterexample in financial development is questionable. Financial system reforms, including encouraging banks to operate independently, reducing or eliminating mandatory loans, and maldngfinancial decision-making more market-oriented, are important for China＇s economic growth.     

Prospect for China-Korea Economic Relations

This paper briefly reviews the economic performance of China's economic reform starting in 1978, and which it presents personal views on the experiences of Korea's economic development and lessons for China's economic reform. The paper reviews the China‐Korea economic relationship, and explores both the opportunities of China's economic development for Korea and the prospects for Bilateral Economic cooperation. It is estimated that the Chinese economy will maintain dynamic growth for the coming decade. The 2008 Olympic Games and the 2010 World Expo in China will provide further impetuses for Chinese economic development. China's huge market and its rapid economic growth can help the further recovery and development of the Korean economy. At the same time, the further development of the Chinese economy can benefit from financial, technical and managerial support from Korea. The complementarities between the industrial structures of China and Korea will surely push their future economic cooperation into a broader and deeper stage. Bilateral trade will enhance the competitiveness of both nations in the global market and help them achieve mutual prosperity and development. (Edited by Xinyu Fan)     

China's Economic Transition Syndrome

Following 30 years of high economic growth, China's economy is in the midst of a classic transition from an industrial to a post‐industrial economy. In this transition period, the mismatch between supply and demand is growing, while the country's economic growth engine is weakening. Stimulus policies have aimed to maintain the country's economic growth momentum but they have come at the price of sharply increased financial fragility and resource misallocation, both of which are harmful to economic growth. China's “economic transition syndrome” refers to the vicious cycle of slowing GDP growth, combined with increasing demand for stimulus policies, and increasing financial fragility and resource misallocation.     

Financial Development, Economic Growth and Adaptive Efficiency： A Comparison between China and Pakistan

The strong economic growth in China is difficult to reconcile with its inefficient financial system. The puzzle of China＇s financial development and growth can be explained through a dynamic criterion of adaptive efficiency, rather than through allocative efficiency. Using the framework of an autoregressive distributed lag model, the present paper tests the hypothesis that the GDP growth rate is dependent on financial development along with other variables in China and Pakistan. The hypothesis cannot be rejected in both cases. However, the results show that economic growth has a negative relationship with credit to the private sector in China. We conclude that financial development is a source of China＇s high growth rate and that the banking system is still under an evolutionary process, involving the pursuit of social objectives instead of the sole objective of profit maximization. Our results provide some implications for other developing countries like Pakistan.     

China's Nonfinancial Corporate Debt Dynamics

Since the global financial crisis broke out in 2008, China's nonfinancial corporate debt has been rising steadily and rapidly, posing serious threat to China's financial stability. China's rising corporate debt is mainly attributable to three factors: worsening capital efficiency, worsening corporate profitability and high funding costs. Based on a dynamic recursive model developed in the paper, we simulate the trajectories of China's corporate debt‐to‐GDP ratio, and find that if China fails to reverse the current trends in capital efficiency, corporate profitability and financing costs, China's nonfinancial corporate debt‐to‐GDP ratio will continue to rise without converging to a limit. Against most economists' intuition, given the current trends of changes in parameters, higher economic growth will not help China to escape the corporate debt trap. On the contrary, it will make China's corporate debt problem even worse. To avert a corporate debt crisis, China needs to speed up the structural reform and change the growth paradigm so as to enhance capital efficiency and firms' profitability, while reducing firms' financing costs.     

Balance sheet expansion and economic growth in China: Crowd in or crowd out?

Balance sheet expansion is crucial to understand the historic path, current slowdown and future trend of economic growth in China. As the financial system transforms national savings into investment, balance sheet expands simultaneously. According to changing impacts of balance sheet expansion on real economy, economic growth in China from 1998 to 2016 can be divided into the crowd-in stage and the crowd-out stage. In the first stage (1998–2007), balance sheet expansion crowded China's real economy in, raised TFP dramatically and accelerated economic growth. In the second stage (2008–2016), balance sheet expansion crowded China's real economy out, with stagnant TFP and decelerated economic growth. Balance sheet expansion has slowed down since 2014, but it continues to exert crowding out effects on China's real economy. We argue that balance sheet expansion is crucial for China's future economic growth. In the long term, structural reforms, especially reforms in the financial system, could increase growth potential significantly. In the short term, financial system reforms should focus on generating sufficient cash flows to boost aggregate demand.     

China： Unscathed through the Global Financial Tsunami

This paper investigates the reasons behind the resilience of China＇s economy to the global financial tsunami. China ＇s economy is lowly leveraged in its banking, household, public and external sectors and, therefore, is less plagued by the global deleveraging than most developed economies. Chinese domestic sectors have improved significantly over the past decade, giving them larger capacity to cope with external shocks than during the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that China＇s economic growth is highly dependent on exports, we find that the main growth engine for China is domestic demand. Destocking, rather than falling exports, was the main cause of the sharp economic slowdown in China in late 2008 and early 2009. Therefore, the global economic slowdown should have limited impact on China＇s economy. We forecast a sustained eeonomic recovery in China in 2009-2011, with real GDP growth exceeding 10 percent in 2010.     

Multiple Forces Driving China＇s Economic Development： A New Analytic Framework

Based on economic growth theory and the World Bank's analytical framework relating to the quality of growth, the present paper constructs a framework that encompasses physical, international, human, natural and knowledge capital to synthetically interpret economic development. After defining the five types of capital and total capital, we analyze the dynamic changes of these types of capital in China and in other countries. The results show that since China's reform and opening up, knowledge, international, human and physical capital have grown rapidly, with speeds of growth higher than that of economic growth. As the five types of capital have all increased at varying paces, the savings level of total capital in China has quadrupled in 25 years and overtook that of the USA in the 1990s. The changes in the five types of capital and total capital reveal that there are progressively multiple driving forces behind China's rapid economic development. Implications for China's long-term economic development are thereby raised.     

Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on China： Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications

This paper applies a structural vector autoregression analysis to quantify the impact of the global financial crisis on China. It is found that the impact is indeed sizeable： a 1-percent decline in economic growth in the USA, the EU and Japan is likely to lead to a0. 73-percent decline in growth in China. The article discusses whether the current measures of fiscal stimulus are adequate to offset the sharp decline in external demand Although there is little doubt that the massive fiscal stimulus will largely offset the significant shortfalls in external demand, the current growth pattern in China will be increasingly unsustainable in the long term. China ＂s reform cycles suggest that external shocks are often opportunities for structural reforms. Therefore, the crisis could also be a catulyst for rebalancing China ＇s economic structure so as to return the economy to a sustainable path.     

The process of financial reforms in China

This study aims to show that financial reforms in China can be viewed as an endogenous adjustment process responding primarily to economic growth and changes in political constraints. The author's argument is thus against the mainstream view in which financial reforms are regarded as primary policy tools for the promotion of economic growth. Three factors are carefully examined for the explanation of the endogenous characteristics of financial reforms. First, this paper takes a close look at endogenous aspects of Chinese financial repression. The endogenous characters of financial repression explain why financial reforms in China follow an endogenous path. Second, recent developments of legal frameworks are found to have been institutional responses to macroeconomic imbalances, financial disorders, and increased demands for property right protection. Finally, this paper shows that the lack of market infrastructure and various political constraints have been major obstacles for China's capital market development.     

Understanding China's Economic Growth from a Regional Policy Perspective

There has been ongoing interest in China's economic growth. What were the drivers of China's economic growth in past years? What policies were used to promote China's economic growth? Although different lenses may be used to understand and explain China's economic growth, this paper draws on historical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives to discuss the nexus between China's regional policies and economic growth. First, we review the evolution of China's regional policy and the policy's changing emphasis in different development stages, from balanced, unbalanced, and coordinated development to synergistic development. Then we construct a theoretical model to illustrate the impact of regional policy on the local economy and conduct an empirical examination with a case study of regional policy using regression discontinuity design. This paper analyzes the concept of regional policy and the underpinning logic of economic growth and presents practical approaches to formulate a better regional policy framework.     

A Contribution to the Empirics of Finance-growth Nexus in China: A Complex System Perspective

Abstract

The paper empirically examines the causal interactions between Chinese financial development and economic growth using the perspective of complex systems as a metaphor in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the co-evolution of China's real and financial sectors. Using Hsiao's version of the Granger causality tests, the empirical results support a complex set of bidirectional causality between the financial development proxies and economic growth variables. Despite numerous alleged financial intermediation's inefficiencies, bidirectional causality would suggest a coherent and effective finance-growth ecosystem.     

Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative: Motivation,framework and assessment

The Belt & Road Initiative is China's greatest international economic ambition, aiming at stimulating economic development in a vast region covering sub regions in Asia, Europe and Africa, which accounts for 64% of world population and 30% of world GDP. The Initiative is devised to reconfigure China's external sector in order to continue its strong growth. While infrastructure development plays a central role, the Belt & Road Initiative is a comprehensive one, including also policy dialogue, unimpeded trade, financial support and people-to-people exchange. It is too early to assess the impact of this ambitious Initiative. It certainly has the potential of turning the underdeveloped “Belt & Road” region into a new vibrant economic pillar and contributing to economic policy thinking by incorporating successful experiences of emerging market economies. However, the Initiative also faces very high barriers, including lack of central coordination mechanism, potential clash of different political regimes and beliefs and financial viability of cross-border projects.     

Financial Development,Market Deregulation and Growth: Evidence from China

In this paper, the relationship between finance and growth is analysed in the context of an endogenous growth model with government regulation and intervention. Our theoretical model suggests that financial intermediaries can affect the process of economic growth in several ways. Using the recent Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) techniques, we test our model in a panel data set covering 29 Chinese provinces over the period of 1990–2001. Empirical results show that financial development and government deregulation in the financial sector significantly promote China's economic growth.     

内部控制、法制水平与实体企业金融化——基于2011—2020年沪深A股制造业上市公司经验数据

近年来，随着资本市场的逐步审慎开放，中国金融业得到了快速发展，而实体经济则随着中国经济转向高质量发展阶段而增速放缓，实体企业基于“蓄水池”效应和“投资替代”效应而不断扩大金融投资，使得企业金融化现象成为学术界关注的焦点问题。系统研究内外部治理对实体企业金融化的作用有利于实体企业“脱虚向实”。基于2011—2020年沪深A股制造业上市公司财务数据，将其金融资产占比连续3年及以上增加界定为金融化，从内外部治理视角探究其对实体企业金融化的影响，最终发现，内部控制质量对实体企业金融化有抑制作用，并且法制水平增强了内部控制质量对实体企业金融化的抑制作用。最后提出抑制企业金融化的建议。     

Host countries’ growth opportunities and China's outward FDI

In 2014, China proposed the Belt and Road policy, which has pushed China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) to over tens of billions of US dollars. However, existing studies have not reached a consensus about the decisive factors in China's OFDI. To verify whether China's OFDI activities are motivated by profits, this paper applies a measure of country‐specific growth opportunities adopted by Bekaert et al. (2007) to measure the growth opportunities of the target countries for China's OFDI. A multinational panel data model, based on data from 51 countries from 2003 to 2012, is used to explore the relationship between host countries’ growth opportunities and China's OFDI. Overall, the analysis finds that China's OFDI does not follow the host countries’ growth opportunities but exhibits different features toward developed countries and developing countries. For developed countries, China's OFDI follows host countries’ growth opportunities to some extent. In the case of developing countries, China's OFDI does not follow host countries’ growth opportunities. When we consider factors such as a host country's financial development and political stability, improvement in these factors improves the attractiveness of the host country to China's OFDI. It is also found that the 2008 global financial crisis did not have a very significant impact on China's OFDI activities.     

ASIAN DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES: CHINA AND INDONESIA COMPARED

China's and Indonesia's development strategies have been compared with others, but rarely with each other. Radically different political contexts have produced both similar and distinctly different development patterns. Each using formal planning, Indonesia spurred radical reforms to promote growth, whereas China opted for incremental reforms to ‘grow out of the Plan’, as a political device and to discover what policies and institutions worked. Both strategies produced environments largely conducive to rapid development. Indonesia relied on a few economic technocrats to oversee development; China used decentralisation and party reforms to create a credible environment for non-state investment. Both shared concern for agricultural reform and food security; both opted to open up for trade—China gradually, Indonesia radically. Both did well in growth and poverty reduction following reform. China's growth performance is in a league of its own, especially since Indonesia's Asian crisis setback, but Indonesia had more equitable growth and survived a difficult political transition with, in hindsight, modest costs.     

双循环新发展格局视域下区际经济高质量协调发展研究

面对国际国内政治格局发生的复杂变化以及全球供应链不确定性增强,中国的经济增长动力向内需和消费方向发展,优化国内市场供需双侧格局,发挥中国市场规模优势和市场容量,构建双循环新发展格局势在必行.通过对中国三大区际经济发展水平对比研究认为东、中、西三大区际经济发展存在较大差异,城镇化水平有助于提升经济发展层次,中、西两大区际具有较大市场空间和发展潜力,是经济协调发展的重要改革重心,高质量协调发展须从促进区际协同机制、产业优化布局、构建消费体系等方面展开,快速整合资源,加快双循环发展布局,共促区域经济繁荣发展.     

Beyond privatization: Institutional innovation and growth in China's large state-owned enterprises

This article demonstrates that China's large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are not stagnant fossils waiting to die. Under economic reform policies this sector has undergone large change due to enhanced enterprise autonomy, the impact of market forces, rapid growth of domestic demand for upstream products, strategic integration with the world economy and the state's policy to promote large businesses. China's large SOEs are developing new institutional forms that do not neatly fit into existing patterns. China is experimentally changing its institutions through a combination of central policy, local initiative and interaction with international investment. This presents a challenge to the “transitional orthodoxy” and to ideas concerning property rights in development economics. There is not a universal model of property rights and government action that works best in all circumstances. China's experience with the reform of large SOEs shows the diverse possibilities for effective industrial institutions.     

Labor Market Reform, Income Inequality and Economic Growth in China

The year 1996 was a turning point both in terms of Chinese labor market reform aria m China＇s economic growth pattern. Before 1996, labor market reform was mainly implemented through adjustment of people＇s occupation and income structure. Since 1996, employment restructuring has led to differentiation in terms of employment status. Labor market reform in the former stage resulted in slow growth in wages, whereas reform in the latter stage enhanced economic efficiency. Both stages have enabled the Chinese economy to apply its comparative advantage of low labor cost. Labor market reform has also increased income disparity and, therefore, new challenges are posed in sustaining economic growth. China needs to adjust its development strategies and introduce labor market reform that can improve income equality, so as to achieve sustainable economic development.