Rise of the gold market in China: liberalisation and market development

The Chinese gold market is rapidly rising to global prominence in the recent decades. The paper reviews the history of the gold market in China and its liberalisation process amid the country’s opening to the outside world. Details of the current market structure and its main business are presented. Global impacts of the rise of the Chinese gold market are discussed.     

Tax incentive,R&D investment and firm innovation: Evidence from China

We estimate the effect of R&D tax incentives on firm-level R&D expenditures (RDE) and patenting using a change in the eligibility criteria for a super deduction in China. In 2006, the Chinese government relaxed the “10 % eligibility criterion”, which stated that only firms with a 10 % or higher increase in prior-year RDE can claim an additional 50 % tax deduction. We use an event study approach to show that firms that became newly eligible to claim the super deduction (those just below the criterion) catches up on RDE and product innovation measured by the sales of new products. In the long run, we also observe a closing gap in the number of patents between the two groups of firms. Moreover, extending tax benefits to all firm helps to lower the tax burden, and we find no evidence of manipulation and relabeling.     

Effect of personality traits on smallholders’ land renting behavior: Theory and evidence from the North China Plain

This study investigates the effect of smallholders’ personality traits on their land rental market decisions. We develop a conceptual framework and show that these internal factors could affect smallholders’ land rental market participation beyond institutional and socio-demographic factors. Our empirical analysis is based on a survey of 2119 rural households collected in the North China Plain. We find that smallholders with a higher level of openness are more active in participating in the farmland rental market. Moreover, internal locus of control plays a significant role in explaining smallholders’ land renting behavior. We further show that need for achievement mediates the link between internal locus of control and smallholder’s intention to rent land, indicating that fostering a higher level of internal locus of control—and subsequently achievement desire—could play an important role in promoting smallholders’ land-renting behavior. More generally, our results imply that taking rural smallholders’ personality traits into account in designing land rental policies may increase the effectiveness of policies aimed at promoting land rental market participation among smallholders and incubating crop farm scale enlargement in rural China.     

Intensive and extensive margins of exports: What can India learn from China?

We decompose India's export performance in manufactured products during 2000–15 into changes at the intensive and extensive margins. India's performance, along different margins, is compared and contrasted with that of China. The results show that while China outperforms India at both the margins, the gap is particularly wide at the intensive margin. Decomposition of intensive margin along quantity and price margins shows that Chinese products are generally sold cheaper than Indian products. Higher price margin, however, has not translated into high intensive margin for India due to its abysmally low quantity margin. We examine different explanations for China's superior performance relative to India, along different margins, using a gravity model. Our results suggest that China's exchange rate policy was not the prime reason for its export success. Neither do we find that FDI inflows were significant in explaining the export performance gap between them. The results show that China's export relationship bias towards high‐income partner countries holds the key in understanding its superior performance. This bias is a natural consequence of China's high degree of specialization in labor‐intensive activities. India, by contrast, due to an idiosyncratic pattern of specialisation, has failed to exploit its export potential in high income countries.     

Performance management 40 years on: a review. Some key decisions and consequences

This paper reviews the past four decades of experience of performance management (PM). Beginning with a brief history of its international spread and development, a short section on conceptual issues is followed by a strategic analysis of the research thus far. From this analysis is extracted a set of key decisions which must be made for any PM system. Each decision has significant consequences, and none are purely technical (though they may occasionally be represented as such). In many cases difficult trade-offs are inevitable.     

Risk assessment for public–private partnership projects: using a fuzzy analytic hierarchical process method and expert opinion in China

Public–private partnerships (PPP) have been widely used in China to procure public facilities and services. Complicated problems in PPP projects in China arise because of a variety of risk factors. A proper risk assessment model is needed to identify risks and provide risk response strategies for future Chinese PPP projects. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) method provides the ability to solve complex risk assessment of PPP projects. Current risk assessment models are limited to PPP projects in specific countries and do not consider unique risks in China, especially political, economic, social, and legal risks. This paper designed a risk evaluation index system for PPP projects based on the Delphi expert investigation method, and then established an optimized risk evaluation model for PPP projects in China using the F-AHP method. The risks identified are confirmed by interviewing experts from Chinese local government departments, private enterprise, third-party intermediary consulting and regulatory agencies, and academic organizations. The results show that the risks that ranked among the top ten are closely related to China’s political and economic policies and relationships among stakeholders. It can be concluded that government authorities play a critical role in providing a favorable political, social, and economic environment and an effective institutional framework for PPP projects. Furthermore, it is also important to deal with relationships among stakeholders based on the public–private ‘win–win’ principle. This study provides risk response strategies, addressing key issues from eight aspects: an impeccable legal and regulatory framework; a central coordinating and regulating PPP authority; supportive governmental authorities; institutional capacity-building; favorable economic conditions and viability; community, partner, and moral accountability; clear division of responsibilities through contracts; and effective advisory management. These effective measures may be useful in reducing the adverse effects of risk for PPP projects in China.     

Cooperative membership and farmers’ choice of marketing channels – Evidence from apple farmers in Shaanxi and Shandong Provinces,China

Cooperatives are established to improve farmers' production conditions, to increase their bargaining power and to enable them to benefit from modern value chains. In China, farmers are members of a cooperative for multiple reasons. Little is known on whether and how cooperative membership affects farmers’ choice of marketing channels. This paper examines determinants of farmers’ choice of marketing channels, especially how cooperative membership impacts upon this choice. Our analysis is based on survey data collected in 2015 among 625 apple growing farm households in the provinces Shaanxi and Shandong. We employ endogenous switching probit models to deal with potential endogeneity of membership in estimating the determinants of marketing channel choices. We find that cooperative membership has a positive impact on selling to wholesalers and a negative impact on selling to small dealers, but no significant impact on selling to the cooperative itself. As products sold through cooperatives generally comply with relatively stringent food quality and safety standards, these results imply that policies promoting cooperative members to sell their products through cooperatives are likely to have a significant impact on food quality and food safety in China.     

结构性去杠杆下的中国宏观经济*——2018年中期中国宏观经济分析与预测

2018年以来中国经济平稳运行，物价水平稳定，就业形势整体向好，经济增长质量稳步提升。不过，当前中国经济仍然面临一定的下行压力，尤其需要警惕消费增速过快下滑、宏观税负进一步加重、民间投资复苏乏力、部分企业效益状况显著恶化、去杠杆过程中金融体系不稳定性加剧等主要风险点。此外，杠杆率高企是现阶段中国经济面临的突出问题，而且中国的杠杆率在不同部门之间以及各部门内部均体现出明显的结构性特点。为此，中央在2018年专门提出了“结构性去杠杆”的新思路。在“结构性去杠杆”稳步推进的大背景下，宏观政策既要积极应对经济下行压力，谨防去杠杆带来的经济增速超预期下滑风险，又要激发经济内生增长动力，促使经济实现长期可持续发展和“高质量发展”。     

Foreign investment,corporate governance and performance in the Chinese listed A Share companies

We present a novel lens on the presence and impact of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFII) in top shareholdings of the non-financial domestically listed Chinese ‘A’ share firms. The initial results suggest that the presence of a QFII as a top shareholder in these companies is associated with their better performance, using both Tobin’s Q and ROA as the performance measures. Our models include variables representing corporate governance mechanisms, foreign legal person shares, a proxy for international affiliations and a number of time-variant firm characteristics. Economically, the coefficient of impact on the market measure is the more significant, while the effect of having a QFII in top shareholdings on both performance measures is empirically significant. Previously, studies have often ignored the potential for reverse causality beyond using lagged regressors. This is problematic. Therefore, we follow up with a 2SLS instrumental variables and system GMM model to further mitigate this potential and find the empirical relationship holds. Contrary to earlier work on QFIIs and governance post-implementation of the QFII scheme, the findings from our models suggest that the presence of a QFII top shareholder augments market performance holding equal existing corporate governance mechanisms and other controls.     

The dynamic role of small- and medium-sized multinationals in global production networks: Norwegian maritime firms in the Greater Shanghai Region in China

This article examines the role of small- and medium-sized multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the dynamic development of global production networks (GPNs) in the maritime industry. It studies the dynamism between subsidiaries of Norwegian maritime firms and regional actors and institutions in the Greater Shanghai Region of China from the perspectives of the subsidiaries. It argues that strategic coupling, recoupling and decoupling are partly the results of regional selection mechanisms. However, in the cases where the subsidiaries are embedded within the host region, the strategies and behaviour of MNEs are of decisive importance for the dynamic development of GPNs.