ECONOMIC ANALYSIS ON THE URBAN–RURAL DISPARITY IN HUMAN CAPITAL IN CHINA

With China's economic development and capital accumulation in the industrial sectors, the human capital level of the labours moving from the rural areas could no longer meet the demand of the industrial sectors. Therefore, “structural shortage of technical labour” emerged in the labour market as a result of excess of demand for high‐skilled workers. Previous literature mostly focused on the relationship between rural human‐capital level and labour movement, income change and economic growth, but in this article, the authors focus on the study of the relative disparity of urban and rural human capital and labour movement, as well as the effect of the change of urban–rural human capital gap on industrial output, profit and social welfare. This article shows that bridging the urban–rural gap in respect of human capital level could not only improve the situation of the “structural shortage of technical labour,” but also have a positive effect on the general social welfare.     

UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND INDUSTRIALISATION IN PRE‐WAR THAILAND

Thailand's economy before 1940 was marked by remarkably low long‐term real economic growth, unusually high levels of the population living in rural areas, and limited industrialisation and urbanisation. This paper examines reasons for the lack of diversification, looking in particular at industrial development. We emphasise Thailand's role in the world economy, sources of labour supply, and the concentration of industry in the capital Bangkok. The impact of the world depression of the 1930s on the Thai economy was only moderate, which obviated the need for state policies that might have prompted significant economic change.     

South Africa's infrastructure service delivery needs: The role and challenge for public‐private partnerships

South Africa's development challenges include over R100 billion needed in investment in infrastructure over the next ten years. Municipalities lack the institutional and financial capacity to address this alone and have to raise private sector finance to supplement their own resources and government grants. The borrowing of capital requires a well‐run administration that is able to raise sufficient revenue to meet all running costs, including loan redemption. Municipalities are showing increasing interest in municipal service partnerships (MSPs), including public‐private partnerships (PPPs), as a way of improving efficiency and accessing capital markets. This raises a number of challenges that include understanding and dealing with the continuing negative perceptions of the role of the private sector; clarifying the roles of the private sector and the government, especially local government; and addressing those issues necessary to produce effective and efficient MSPs in South Africa.     

Expected Failures and Unexpected Successes of Land Titling in Africa

The imposition of market-oriented economic reforms throughout Africa in the 1990s has sparked renewed debate over the desirability of state-sponsored land titling programs. Proponents argue that land titling is an essential foundation for economic growth. Opponents contend that titling programs are unnecessary and premature at best, or detrimental at worst. This paper addresses these concerns through an examination of Cameroon's 1974 Lands Ordinance. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we find that the 1974 Lands Ordinance has not introduced Western-style private property rights in Cameroon's agrarian sector. Nevertheless, the ordinance is not irrelevant to rural farmers. Rural farmers have used the ordinance to obtain concrete boundary markers on their land, enhancing their tenure security. In addition, administrators have used the ordinance to register underdeveloped land, reducing the contradictions between state law and customary law. These findings suggest that policy-makers could fruitfully redesign their land tenure policies to render them more attractive to rural farmers, and thereby give the state a more constructive role in enhancing tenure security, and in promoting economic growth.     

The economic development approach to legal reform for rural women: A methodological alternative

Legislative efforts to promote rural women's economic productivity have focused on strategies for improving access to and control over agricultural resources. Women make up 50 per cent of the world's farmers, but in many developing countries they are unable to hold or manage productive resources in their own name. Most legal proposals recommend family law reform as the entry point for change. This article argues for a broader approach. All the laws that affect rural economic development should be evaluated and linked in ways that promote rural women's integration into the economic mainstream. In agriculture the‐most important legislation is natural resource management, local government development and agricultural development and agricultural investment laws, including research, intellectual property protection, cooperatives, banking and marketing. Each law should be assessed from the perspective of four generic development attributes: how it contributes to women's representation in policymaking; what economic benefits it provides; whether it facilitates the evolution of organisational structures to help women attract capital; and whether there are clear systems for enforcing rights and therefore minimising risk. Next, the process is reversed to determine how the laws collectively support each of the four areas. This methodology allows the researcher to tease out and rearrange essential elements of a comprehensive enabling environment that provide a sufficient level of institutional support in all four areas across the entire spectrum of agricultural development.     

农村信用社变迁进程的政府行为与效率因应:鲁省证据

农村信用社产权制度改革已进入深水区。制度变迁过程中,政府采用资金扶持、利率优惠、差额准备金率、税收减免以及管理权下放到省政府等系列措施推动农村信用社改革。对改革进程中的山东省农村信用社经营效率进行跟踪的结果显示,强制性制度变迁背景下的农村信用社改革其经营效率提升不显著,农村信用社决策指令化、管理粗放式、公司治理薄弱等问题和矛盾依然较为突出。应转变农村信用社管理模式,提高其经营管理水平和增强其市场竞争力。     

AN ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

This paper analyses long‐term trends in the development of South Africa's economic infrastructure and discusses their relationship with the country's long‐term economic growth. A database covering national accounts data, railways, roads, ports, air travel, phone lines and electricity was established for this purpose, and may facilitate further quantitative research. PSS (Pesaran, Shin and Smith, 1996, 2001) F‐tests are used to identify directions of association between economic infrastructure and economic growth. These indicate long‐run forcing relationships from public‐sector economic infrastructure investment and fixed capital stock to gross domestic product (GDP), from roads to GDP, and from GDP to a range of other types of infrastructure. There is also evidence of potential simultaneity between specific types of infrastructure and GDP. The evidence suggests three main findings. Firstly, the relationship between economic infrastructure and economic growth appears to run in both directions. Inadequate investment in infrastructure could create bottlenecks, and opportunities for promoting economic growth could be missed. Secondly, South Africa's stock of economic infrastructure has developed in phases. Policymakers should focus on choosing or encouraging the right type of infrastructure at the right time. Thirdly, the need for investment in economic infrastructure never goes away. The maintenance and expansion of infrastructure are important dimensions of supporting economic activity in a growing economy, provided that individual projects are chosen on the basis of appropriate cost‐benefit analyses.     

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.     

Women of an uncertain age: quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century†

Geary and Stark find that Ireland's post‐Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long‐run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population's basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen‐Li find that gender‐specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self‐reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark's interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe's club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital.     

The Role of Property Rights in the Relationship between Capital Flows and Economic Growth in SSA: Do Natural Resources Endowment and Country Income Level Matter?

This paper studies the role played by the quality of property rights in the linkages of international capital flows into sub‐Saharan African (SSA) economies. Using panel data of 36 SSA countries over the period 1996–2015 and the ARDL procedure with the Pooled Mean Group regression method appropriate for non‐stationary panel data estimation, we account for the joint effects of property rights quality and openness to foreign capital flows on economic growth. We uncover the existence of a property rights quality threshold beyond which property rights either amplifies the spillovers effects or attenuates the negative effect of capital flows on economic growth. For instance, it takes a level of property rights of at least 60 to have a positive long‐term impact of capital flows on economic growth in natural resource‐poor African countries. The quality of property rights matters more to obtain spillover effects of capital flows on growth in natural resource‐poor countries than in their peer natural resource‐rich countries. Finally, with regard to the countries' income levels, capital flows have significant long‐term spillovers effects on economic growth in advanced African economies than in their low‐income peers.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Agricultural development and the distribution of water resources in Kgatleng District,Botswana

During Botswana's four decades of high levels of growth the agricultural sector has lagged behind, with smallholder productivity being especially poor. This paper applies an equity perspective: its main claim is that one important explanation for the current lack of agricultural development is the unequal distribution of agricultural resources. It takes into account both the national institutional structure, which promotes widespread inequality, and the distribution of boreholes and water resources on the communal grazing range in Kgatleng District. It argues that ever since the first administrative effort to develop water resources in the 1920s the country's official policy and legislation has directly or indirectly favoured the large-scale farmers over the smallholders and, further, that customary property rights principles have supported the process that has led to today's institutional inequality.     

制度变迁与内生经济增长

本文将制度变迁引入了内生增长模型,刻画了制度影响经济增长的内在机制,求解了社会计划者问题的均衡解,并对解的经济含义进行了讨论。模型的基本结论是,制度变迁是经济增长的决定性因素,政府可以通过合理配置人力资本来促进经济增长。     

Rural–urban income disparity: impact of growth,allocative efficiency,and local growth welfare

Historical data of economic development suggest a Kuznets–Williamson type of relationship between economic growth and income disparity. Using China's provincial data, we first try to determine to what extent such a relationship is valid in the urban–rural disparity context. Next, we identify some factors other than economic growth that might have affected urban–rural disparity. In particular, we calculate and compare the inter-sector gross allocation effect (GAE) at the provincial level to discern the impact of labor mobility and allocative efficiency on urban–rural disparity. We also try to evaluate the contribution of local governance to urban–rural disparity by looking into regional differences in effectiveness of economic growth to raise local standard of living. Policy implications of the findings are discussed in the light of China's institutional reforms and development strategies.     

The struggle to regain effective government under democracy in Indonesia*

With Soeharto's demise, Indonesia gained democracy but lost effective government. A return to sustained, rapid economic growth will require an overhaul of Indonesia's bureaucracy and judiciary which, along with the legislatures, the military and the state-owned enterprises, had been co-opted by the former president into his economy-wide ‘franchise’—a system of government designed to redistribute income and wealth from the weak to the strong while maintaining rapid growth. This franchise has disintegrated, its various component parts now working at cross-purposes rather than in mutually reinforcing fashion. The result has been a significant decline in the security of property rights and, in turn, the continued postponement of a sustained economic rebound. To reform the civil service it will be necessary to undertake a radical overhaul of its personnel management practices and salary structures, so as to provide strong incentives for officials to work in the public interest.     

The Role of Agriculture on the Recent Brazilian Economic Growth: How Agriculture Competes for Resources

Drawing upon the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database, and other time series data, we construct a multi‐sector Ramsey model that shows the transition growth of the Brazilian agricultural sector and its effects on growth of the industrial and service sector of the economy, with particular emphasis given to the years 1994–2010. Our results capture the importance of the agriculture's capital intensity and the sector's factor productivity on the sector's growth, the substitution of capital for labor in agriculture, and the sustaining of agriculture's share in Brazilian GDP. These features are rather unique among emerging economies, most of which have experienced a transition out of agriculture and growth in nonfarm production relative to agriculture.     

Elites and the expansion of education in nineteenth‐century Sweden

A large literature emphasizes that elite capture of political institutions hampered the spread of mass schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We collect new data on investments in elementary education and the distribution of voting rights for more than 2,000 local governments in nineteenth‐century Sweden and document that educational expenditure was higher where the distribution of political power was more unequal. In particular, areas governed by local landed elites—even those where a single landowner had de jure dictatorial powers—invested substantially more in mass schooling relative to areas where political power was more widely shared, or where it lay in the hands of capitalist elites. Our findings lend quantitative support to an earlier literature produced by economic and social historians which argues that landed elites advanced mass schooling as part of their historical role as patrons of the local community and as a response to the increasing proletarianization of the rural population, while also furthering our understanding of how Sweden maintained a high level of human capital despite its low level of economic development and restricted franchise in the nineteenth century.     

制度竞争、文化资本与人的发展——基于经济转型的视角

制度竞争已经成为当今世界竞争的核心，文化资本在制度竞争中的地位和作用越来越重要。而文化资本中人的发展问题是根本。从当今经济转型来看，提升文化资本的竞争力，重要的是转型过程中制度安排要做到促进人的发展，包括确保公民享有基本权利、维护公平竞争以促进知识增长、制度建设要融合多文化因素等。