Salvador Allende's development policy: Lessons after 50 years

Last year, 2020, was the 50th anniversary of the opening of the ‘Chilean road to socialism’ by Salvador Allende. Although the Allende government is the political reference for the 'socialism of the 21st century’ in Latin America, international supporters tend to disregard the primary cause of its downfall, focusing instead on the circumstances of Allende's death. This article explains the link between the Allende government's development policies and its macroeconomic outcomes between 1970 and 1973. It finds that Chile's economic collapse had an endogenous cause related to government policies. This supports the views of Mises and Hayek on the feasibility of socialist economic policies. Policymakers and commentators should recognise essential lessons from the Chilean experience to learn from past errors and effectively promote Latin America's economic development.     

新时代中国国际政治经济学研究:问题与方向

国际形势的迅速变化为国际政治经济学研究提供了更为广阔的研究视野,但面对复杂多变的世界经济和政治形势,单纯的经济学研究往往无法解释现实,经济学、政治学以及社会学等诸多学科间的分立与隔绝状态不利于国际政治经济学的深入发展。中国的国际政治经济学研究需要关注五个方面的问题:第一,打破经济学尤其是国际经济学研究的专业壁垒;第二,加强对经济全球化问题的综合性研究;第三,注重对美国国内经济结构变化及其对社会生活、政治生活与对外政策影响的研究;第四,加强对国际货币、资本、金融运行机制的深入研究并从货币权力视角构建国际政治经济学框架;第五,加强对1500年以来大国兴衰过程中"挑战国陷阱"问题的研究。只有在解决好上述五个问题的基础上,国内理论界才能构建一个符合新时代要求的国际政治经济学理论和大国关系理论,并以此支撑中国的可持续崛起。     

A two-sector Kaleckian model of growth and distribution with endogenous productivity dynamics

This study extends a two-sector Kaleckian model of output growth and income distribution by incorporating endogenous labour productivity growth. The model is composed of investment goods and consumption goods production sectors. The impact of a change in wage and profit shares on capacity utilisation and output growth rates at the sectoral and aggregate levels are identified. The study reveals short-run cyclical capacity utilisation rates and productivity growth dynamics. Even if the short-run steady state is stable, the capital accumulation rate in the consumption goods sector must decrease more than that in the investment sector for long-run stability. When simultaneous rises in profit shares in both the sectors affect long-run aggregate economic growth differently at a steady state, the distributional interests between the same class in different sectors may hamper the long-run economic growth. A policy message is that the effect of income distribution on industrial output growth is not always beneficial. These phenomena are specific to two-sector models and cannot be observed when using conventional aggregate growth models.     

农地发展权流出、资本回流与区域经济增长*——基于重庆市的实证研究

[目的]以重庆市为研究区域,以农地发展权资本化的地票指标为研究对象,从理论和实证层面探讨农地发展权交易与资本要素的城乡互动关系及其对区域经济增长的影响,为进一步优化农地发展权交易政策、促进区域均衡发展提供相关建议。[方法]基于2008—2017年城乡统筹改革试验区重庆市地票指标交易的面板数据,运用要素禀赋理论和差分GMM模型从理论和实证层面分析农地发展权流出区土地与资本要素的互动关系及其对区域经济增长的影响。[结果]基于区域间资源禀赋的差异及要素相对价格的分化,在市场机制作用下,农地发展权指标将以配置效率优化为导向在不同区域间自由流动。[结论]短期内,由于资本约束,流出农地发展权的区域其经济增长会受到抑制;而当农地发展权指标资本化后,流出区获得了较为稀缺的货币资本,农地发展权流出将显著促进地方经济增长;同时,在研究时期内,由于农地发展权市场交易机制的构建,重庆市地方经济增长存在显著的收敛效应,区域间经济发展差距将会逐步缩小。     

Credit constraints and productivity of SMEs: Evidence from Canada

To what extent firms are constrained by external credit is usually unobserved in commonly used firm-level data. We use a survey of financing among Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises to measure the likelihood of a firm being constrained by credit. We find that firm size, current debt-to-asset ratio and cash flow are robust indicators of being financially constrained, while long-term debt to asset ratio is not a significant indicator of credit constraints. We then estimate the firm-level total factor productivity, taking into account the measured credit constraints. Omitting credit constraints leads to an upward bias of productivity estimates, by 4 percent. In addition, we find no strong evidence that suggests credit constraints lead to slower productivity growth. Finally, we confirm that both investment and employment growth are negatively affected by the measured credit constraints.     

产业集聚、市场集中对区域创新能力的作用——基于京津冀、长三角两大经济圈制造业的比较

产业集聚和市场集中是影响区域创新能力的重要因素。本文考察了京津冀、长三角两大经济圈制造业产业集聚与市场集中对区域技术创新能力的作用。实证分析结果表明：两大经济圈制造业集聚与市场集中均在一定程度上促进了区域创新能力的提升，但由于两大区域体制机制条件、创新环境、产业组织形态等不同，制造业产业集聚影响区域技术创新的程度、特征与路径也存在一定差别。两大经济圈应采取差异化集群发展方式，加快推进制造业集群升级，特别是应抢抓第四次工业革命发展机遇，提升制造业智能化水平，提升区域创新能力水平。     

Financial development,economic growth and convergence clubs

To study the role of financial development in economic growth, we apply an array of convergence tests designed to capture nonlinear transitional dynamics to real outputs per capita. Strong evidence of multiple convergence clubs is observed, implying that the clubs are formed based on the initial level of real output per capita and average growth rate. Our empirical results show that the stage of economic growth of each country plays an important role for the composition of the convergence clubs. Furthermore, financial development emerges to be a significant determinant, albeit plays differently in the economic growth of each convergence club.     

Land use regulation and urban land value: Evidence from China

Land use regulation has always been regarded as one of the most crucial means of macro-control of urban growth, which can affect a city’s land values directly and further determine related urban economic well-being. Since the New Type Urbanization Strategy proposed by the government in 2014, China’s mode of urban growth has been transformed from addressing “quantity” to “quality" in the urbanization process. In this case, the regulation of land use by the Chinese government plays a more important role in urban growth. With their planned land regulatory scheme, the various instruments employed by Chinese governments have quite different mechanisms influencing land prices. However, there are no rigorous studies focusing on the land use regulation system and its impact on land values to date, particular in China. This study seeks to explore how land use regulation affects urban land values through the systematic lens. We summarize the main land use regulatory instruments based on the analysis of China’s planned land use system and urban land banking system, including the construction land quota, constraints on the allowed floor area ratio (FAR) of each land transaction parcel, and land supply restrictions. A new dataset based on land transaction data from 2007 to 2016 that covers 286 prefectural cities from the country’s coastal, central, and western regions is used in the empirical analysis. The results show that the effects of the floor area ratio (FAR) on land values are significant and positive, with the residential and commercial land supply ratio being a key factor. Moreover, the results imply that the effects of constraints on FAR and commercial land supply vary between regions. These findings indicate that the Chinese land market is considerably distorted by excessive administrative interventions by local governments, in the stage of urban transition guided, the capable regulatory instruments could play an important role in adjusting urban land prices and hence impact on urban growth.     

Comparing the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban expansion in Guangzhou and Shenzhen from 1975 to 2015: A case study of pioneer cities in China’s rapid urbanization

The distinct urbanization process of China has attracted worldwide attention because of its impressive speed, massive scale, and policy intervention. However, the interrelationship between urban expansion and government policies is still not well understood. The Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration of China is the first national pioneering urbanization area since the implementation of the policy “Reform and Opening-up” in the late 1970s. Here we compared the spatial and temporal patterns of urbanization in two leading cities of the Pearl River Delta (i.e., Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the provincial capital and the first Special Economic Zone of China, respectively) from 1975 to 2015, using Landsat data integrated with urban growth and landscape metrics analysis, and examined possible footprints of major economic and urbanization policies. Our results illustrated that urban land areas in both Guangzhou and Shenzhen have experienced magnificent annual growth rates at 8.1% and 11%, respectively between 1975 and 2015. On average, Shenzhen witnessed substantially higher urban growth rate than Guangzhou during the past four decades, particularly in the initial period (1978–1990) when the Reform and Opening-up policy was launched and Shenzhen was designated as the first Special Economic Zone in China in the late 1970s. However, the speed of urban expansion in Shenzhen became considerably lower than Guangzhou from 2005 to 2015, subject to physical conditions and a series of urban land use policies. Both cities showed a generally similar dynamics of urban growth forms with leapfrogging as the predominant type of urban growth at first and then edge-expansion while the contribution of infilling in Shenzhen was higher than that in Guangzhou, especially since 2005. The urbanization processes characterized by landscape and urban growth metrics revealed that a diffusion-coalescence-diffusion-coalescence process was identified for Guangzhou, while Shenzhen was generally consistent with the diffusion-coalescence urban growth hypothesis.