SOURCES OF INCOME DIFFERENCES ACROSS CHINESE PROVINCES DURING THE REFORM PERIOD: A DEVELOPMENT ACCOUNTING EXERCISE

The present paper performs a development accounting analysis to investigate the sources of China's interprovincial income inequality over the period 1982–2005. We estimate a Cobb–Douglas aggregate production function with various specifications. Using the estimated parameters, we conduct a development accounting analysis as well as a variance decomposition. Our results suggest that differences in physical capital intensity and in total factor productivity are both important sources of cross‐province income differences, each accounting for roughly half of the variation in income levels. Differences in human capital explain only a small amount of income differences across provinces. The results are robust to whether or not the assumption of constant returns to scale is imposed. The interaction between factor accumulation and total factor productivity is also discussed.     

欠发达地区农民消费与持久收入假说——以重庆为例

论文采用了弗里德曼和苏良军的分解方法得到持久收入、暂时收入,并运用分位数回归(quantile regression,QR)方法验证持久收入假说,结果表明持久收入假说失灵。进一步实证分析发现,超过60%的重庆农村居民按照当期收入消费,重庆农村居民的消费对当期收入表现出相当程度的过度敏感性,这是持久收入假说失灵的原因。研究还发现未来收入的不确定性对重庆农村居民消费具有显著性影响,而流动性约束却没有显著性影响。     

Shareholdings of Board Members and Corporate Performance: A Panel Quantile Regression Analysis

This paper investigates the impact of board member shareholdings on corporate performance in China and Taiwan, and employs unbalanced panel data over the period 2005–2009. In view of the inconsistent empirical findings in the literature and the limitations of least squares regressions, this study adopts a quantile regression method including fixed effects (FE) models. An important finding is that a significant, positive relationship exists between the shareholdings of board members and accounting measures of performance, and this relationship only exists for the more profitable firms in China, while a uniformly significant and positive relationship exists across all quantiles between the shareholdings of board members and accounting measures of performance in Taiwan. These findings, which cannot be obtained using a FE model, suggest that board members can influence firm performance through holding shares in most Taiwan firms and profitable Chinese firms.     

Mixing Family Business with Politics in Thailand*

This paper uses newly compiled data on Thai family businesses and their direct participation in politics to examine whether the political participation of family business yields private economic payoff. The paper finds that the political participa‐tion of family members is positively associated with the profitability of family businesses. Furthermore, this ‘political benefit’ is found to be particularly large when firms are connected to cabinet members. These results support the crony capitalism view that powerful business groups in Thailand have an incentive to directly hold influential public offices to influence economic policy in their favor.     

Imperfect Competition, Economic Miracle, and Manufacturing Productivity Growth: Empirical Evidence from Taiwan

Several recent studies on total factor productivity (TFP) concluded that the East Asian economies benefited little from TFP growth. This study claims that the failure by previous studies to consider the effect of net indirect taxes and market imperfections resulted in the underestimation of the share of the contribution of labor input to factor income, which consequently led to the overestimation of capital share and understatement of TFP growth. Therefore, this study has modified the conventional approach of calculating factor shares by taking account of net indirect taxes and market imperfections and used the modified approach to estimate TFP growth in 16 Taiwanese manufacturing industries during the period 1979–1999. The conclusion drawn by the study is that TFP growth was the driving force behind the success of Taiwan's manufacturing industries, although many of these industries experienced a sharp decline in TFP during the 1990s.     

The impact of agricultural technology adoption on income inequality in rural China: Evidence from southern Yunnan Province

This study analyzes the impact on income inequality of government efforts to increase agricultural incomes in rural China. It collects and analyzes survey data from 473 households in Yunnan, China in 2004. In particular, it investigates the effects of government efforts to promote improved upland rice technologies. Our analysis shows that farmers who adopted these technologies had incomes approximately 15% higher than non-adopters. Despite this relatively large increase, we estimate that the impact on income inequality was relatively slight. This is primarily due to the fact that lower-income farmers adopted the improved rice technology at rates that were roughly equivalent to those of higher-income farmers.     

基于分位数回归法的安徽省粮食产量影响因素分析

首先利用滤波分析对改革开放以来安徽省粮食安全的相关数据进行处理,根据粮食产量的变化特征将其划分为两个阶段,接着利用分位回归模型对各阶段影响粮食总产量的各分位数进行因素分析,更为细致和深入地研究了粮食总产量及其影响因素之间的回归关系,最后依据模型分析的结果,对安徽省增加粮食产量提出了相应的政策建议。     

Export Intensity and Plant Characteristics: What Can We Learn from Quantile Regression?

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio. For example, firm size is statistically significant at a conventional level for the 0.25 quantile only; branch plant status matters at the upper tail of the conditional distribution of the export/sales ratio only; the craft shop dummy is only significant for the very top quantile; and patents do not matter at the very lower end of the conditional distribution of export over sales. This has implications both for understanding what makes a successful exporter, and for the design of policy measures with a focus on supporting exporters. JEL no. F10, D21, L60     

Fiscal Policies and Poverty Incidence: The Case of Thailand

The evidence presented in this paper suggests that moderate, once-only pro-poor fiscal reallocations may have significant effects on both poverty incidence and inequality. The paper simulates the effects of hypothetical reallocations of the total tax burden away from taxes falling heavily on the poor (indirect taxes in general) and towards those falling predominantly on the rich (direct taxes, especially the personal income tax). It performs a similar exercise for hypothetical reallocations of expenditures and for changes in the overall size of taxes and expenditures, deriving the effects that these reallocations have on both poverty incidence (headcount measure) and inequality (Gini coefficient).     

Trade Liberalization,Economic Restructuring and Urban Poverty: The Case of China*

Increased trade openness and rapid market-oriented transformation have largely altered the patterns of wealth accumulation and wealth distribution in post-reform China. In the present paper, with the help of Chinese provincial level data over the period of 1986 to 2000, simultaneous equations estimation and generalized method of moment techniques are applied to investigate the relationship between trade and poverty in urban China. Empirical results suggest that China's trade liberalization helps to reduce urban poverty both directly and indirectly through its favorable impacts on economic growth.