The changing spatial economy of cities: An exploratory analysis of Cape Town

The spatial economy of South African cities is generally believed to be experiencing selective deconcentration, which may exacerbate social inequality because of the physical disconnection between jobs and population. This paper assesses whether the locational pattern of economic activity across Cape Town is following this trajectory, using data from the Regional Service Council levies between 2001 and 2005. One of the main findings is that the city centre and areas close to the centre have maintained their economic dominance, therefore Cape Town remains a monocentric city. Yet the pattern of recent growth is more dispersed than the prior distribution because suburban nodes have gained a disproportionate share of new activity. In addition, the pattern of recent growth is skewed towards the high-income suburbs and away from the Cape Flats where most of the city's poor live. This uneven growth trajectory may be a source of concern for economic, social and environmental reasons.     

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.     

Human capital quality and the regional economic growth: Evidence from China

China's economic development has advanced from a high-speed to a high-quality growth stage in recent years. The optimization and upgrading of the economic structure require high-quality human capital to support an innovation-driven economy. In this paper, a general equilibrium model of human capital (Xiang & Yeaple, 2018) is applied to estimate the cognitive and non-cognitive productivities based on Chinese provincial-level macro-data and individual labor's micro-data from 2008 to 2017. The weighted power mean of cognitive and non-cognitive productivities helps calculate the provincial-level human capital quality index (HCQI), which provides a realistic estimate of human capital quality. We find that the improvement of the HCQI leads to convergence in economic growth in China's provinces. HCQI can help explain the differences in economic growth levels in different regions of China. Our study provides a constructive step in understanding cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and HCQI in China, which could help guide education investment policy in China and its provinces.     

论中部地区经济发展的金融支持策略

长期以来,我国中部地区金融发展比较落后,制约了经济的快速发展。要促进中部地区经济的崛起,除了国家层面的政策支持以外,加快中部地区金融发展,促进金融对经济的支持作用也是一个不可缺少的重要条件。     

近20年我国国防支出与经济增长关系分析

以1997年到2017年间国防支出与GDP的数据为基础，对近20年来我国国防支出与经济增长的关系进行了探讨，并进一步地分析了在军民融合过程中经济建设与国防建设之间的发展关系。首先，通过描述性统计、相关性分析、回归分析等方法，初步探讨了国防支出与GDP之间的关系；然后基于VAR模型进行了相关的计算和分析验证；最后综合这些方法，对结果进行了较为系统全面的讨论。结果显示，近20年来，我国国防支出与经济增长基本呈正相关关系，经济增长与国防支出能够相互促进，呈现一种良性的关系。长期来看，不仅经济的增长有利于军费投入的提高，反过来国防支出也可以调节经济总量，促进现有资源的充分利用，从而促进经济增长。这从侧面反映出近年来我国国防建设与经济建设、安全与发展能够实现统筹兼顾、军民融合总体发展成效显著，建设军民一体化的国家战略协调能力正在不断提高。     

Development of financial intermediation and economic growth: The Chinese experience

Using Chinese provincial data from 1985 to 1999 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels, this paper examines how the development of financial intermediation influences China's economic growth during the post-1978 reform period. Our econometric results show that China's financial intermediation development contributes to its rapid economic growth through two channels: first, the substitution of loans for state budget appropriation and second, the mobilization of household savings. Loan expansion, however, does not contribute to growth since loan distribution by financial intermediaries is inefficient. Deep financial sector reform aimed at correcting this inefficiency is desirable, and is expected to sustain China's economic development in the future.     

房地产投资会阻碍区域经济增长吗？——基于中国2000—2017年的经验证据

近年来中国经济出现增长速度放缓、产业结构失衡等一系列问题,资源错配是产生这些问题的原因之一.从房地产投资出发,分析其通过房地产业、非房地产业、消费、经济风险影响经济增长的作用机制,并利用中国31个省(直辖市、自治区)2000—2017年的面板数据加以实证考察.研究发现:在观测期内,房地产投资对经济增长的促进作用低于非房地产投资;全国样本的实证结果显示房地产投资与经济增长呈现倒"U"形关系,说明房地产投资的增加最终会阻碍经济增长;分区域样本的实证结果表明,东北地区和中部地区与全国样本的趋势一致,呈现倒"U"形关系.其中,东北地区只有辽宁省于2014年跨过拐点,房地产投资对东北地区经济增长主要起到促进作用;中部地区6省分别从2008—2011年开始陆续跨过拐点,并持续至样本期末,说明房地产投资对中部地区经济增长造成的负面影响已经持续了10年左右.东部和西部地区的房地产投资与区域经济增长呈现显著的正向线性关系.     

Reforming Budgetary Institutions in Latin America: The Case for a National Fiscal Council

Latin America's economies have made tremendous improvements in recent years. Following the lost decade of the 1980s, economic growth has resumed. But the fruits of this progress remain to be consolidated. The political consensus supporting reform is fragile, and the economies of the region are still susceptible to destabilizing shocks, as recent events have underscored. Even well-devised economic policy strategies can be thrown off course by disturbances. This article proposes an institutional reform—a National Fiscal Council—designed to allow Latin American countries to break out of this vicious circle.     

浅谈我国投资和消费的失衡问题

随着我国市场经济的发展,消费已经成为拉动经济增长的主导力量。而从根本上来说,投资是为消费服务的,没有消费的增长,投资就不可能得到有效的增长。如在消费没有回升迹象的情况下,投资需求的大幅回升,还会增加无效供给,使消费不足的矛盾变得更加突出。而近几年,我国的经济增长明显地由投资主导,消费和投资失衡,消费对经济增长的拉动作用减弱。     

What＇s So Special about China＇s Exports？ A Comment

Dani Rodrik argues that China's exports are unusually sophisticated for a country at its income level. He also claims that China's export sophistication reflects the government's successful industrial policy and has been instrumental in the recent acceleration of its economic growth. Although Rodrik's interpretation of China's economic growth is broadly correct, the accuracy of his empirical analysis is questionable. This note identifies several problems regarding the “export sophistication” index used in his empirical work and casts doubt on his analysis.     

Growth cycles and business cycles of the Chinese economy through the lens of the unobserved components model

We build upon the most recent development in the literature and estimate a comprehensive set of univariate and bivariate Unobserved Components models to study the varying long-run growth rate and output gap of the Chinese economy for the period of 1952–2017. We find that the long-run growth rate varied substantially, and thus the growth cycles played an important role in the Chinese economy. Specifically, the long run growth rate accelerated since the late 70s, peaked in the early 90s, and since then has continuously declined except for several years right after China's entrance into the WTO. We also find that although the recent 4-trillion-Yuan economic stimulus package helped to sustain the economic growth temporarily it appeared to have accelerated the decline of the long run growth rate. We also find that the potential growth rate is estimated to be slightly above 8% as in 2017, but the output gap has become negative since 2015 and this recession at the business cycle frequency continuously deepened until the end of the sample.     

Shift from Input‐based Growth to Productivity‐based Growth in Korean Manufacturing Industry

The Korean economy has entered a period of relatively sluggish growth after experiencing very dynamic and high economic growth since the 1970s. The recent growth rate has been around 3 percent, which is similar to that in many advanced countries. According to growth accounting, economic growth is possible because of input increases and productivity increases. Productivity growth is much more important than input increases for long‐term economic growth. We investigated whether there was a structural break in the Korean manufacturing industry and whether the main factor contributing to economic growth shifted from input to productivity. Using various econometric methods, we tested this question and found some interesting results. First, there was an important change in the 1990s, and the productivity trend seemed to show a big structural break at that time. Second, an input increase was the main factor contributing to economic growth before the break and productivity became more important after the break. Third, there was also a major change in the relationship between international trade and productivity.     

Savings,Growth and the Resource Curse Hypothesis

An important connection between recent attempts to understand the determinants of economic growth and the measurement of sustainability is the finding of a negative and significant relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth. This is the so-called resource curse hypothesis. Using cross-country regressions, we offer evidence that the curse may itself be a manifestation of the inability of governments to manage large resource revenues sustainably. In particular, these results offer another perspective on the resource curse hypothesis: the countries where growth has lagged are those where the combination of natural resource, macroeconomic and public expenditure policies have led to a low rate of genuine saving (net saving adjusted for resource depletion).     

Is the Export-led Growth Hypothesis Enough to Account for China＇s Growth？

One of the missing pieces preventing us from understanding recent Chinese economic development is the role played by openness and capital accumulation in this process. The question is whether the sharp economic＇ growth that the Chinese economy has experienced is another case of export-led growth due to the open-door policy or whether, on the contrary, this growth has been caused by high domestic savings and investment rates （and the consequent capital accumulation）. To answer this question, we employed an empirical framework of the cointegrated vector autoregressive model. The empirical results show that both investment （in physieal capital and R＆D） and exports, as well as the exchange rate policy, are relevant factors in explaining China＇s long-run economic growth over the past 4 decades.     

The Impact of Increased School Enrollment on Economic Growth in Tanzania

Abstract: Two different positions prevail in the recent discussion on the impact of education on economic growth: those who support a positive correlation between schooling and economic growth rates and those who claim that the impact of schooling on growth has been overstated. What is intriguing about this discussion is that both positions are based on theory and the results from empirical studies. We examine the long‐term effects of increased school enrollment (and effective attendance) on economic growth in Tanzania using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (DCGE) model. We find that an increase in human capital formation in the long run leads only to a moderate increase of economic growth rates but to a substantial improvement of factor incomes to low‐education households, while overall income effects are Pareto efficient.     

Mercantilism and urban inequalities in eighteenth-century Sweden

Abstract

It is sometimes argued that inequality promotes growth. If savings are the key to economic growth and the marginal propensity to save rises with income, a more unequal society will save more and grow faster. Thus, by sacrificing equality and concentrating income and wealth in the hands on the entrepreneurial class, society might enjoy higher economic growth. The economic policies taken by the Swedish state during the eighteenth century had the explicit goal of concentrating trade and opportunities for income formation and capital accumulation in the hands of the merchant class. Both an older tradition as well as recent research have emphasised the positive sides of these policies, as the privileged merchants are depicted as dynamic engines of growth and an important factor in the process of capital accumulation. However, in this paper it is argued that this assertion is not warranted. The mercantilist policies resulted in neither measurable per capita growth nor dynamic transformation but in institutional rigidities and the enrichment of the rich and impoverishment of the poor, leading to increasing urban inequalities.     

Did banks cause the German industrialization?

In this paper, we discuss the causal relationship between growth of bank assets and economic performance (economic growth, capital accumulation, productivity). We analyze new data for German banking (Burhop, C., 2002. Die Entwicklung der deutschen Aktienkreditbanken von 1848 bis 1913: Quantifizierungsversuche. Bankhistorisches Archiv 28, 103-128.) and improved national accounting data (Burhop, C., Wolff, G.B., 2005. A compromise estimate of Germany’s Net National Product 1851-1913 and its relevance for economic growth and cycles. forthcoming, Journal of Economic History.) with several recent VAR/VEC based causality tests. Only weak evidence for a causal influence of banks on economic performance on a nation-wide level is detected. On the other hand, the results support the bank-led growth hypothesis for the modern sector of the German economy. In particular, joint-stock credit banks positively influenced capital formation during the early decades of Germany’s industrialization.     

China in Asia

China's surge to become the world's second largest economy and largest trading nation contributes greatly to Asia becoming the world's largest economic system. China is the nexus of intra-Asian trade and direct investment flows. China's rapid growth in the recent decade relied on a state-directed investment model, akin to the state-run Big Push growth model. As in most big push experiences, intermediate term success leads to economic stresses. China's leaders can no longer ignore obvious signs of rising malinvestment, corporate debts, environmental degradation, and social disparity, all amid an aging population and tightening resource constraints. China's economic slowdown also forces economic adjustment upon its neighbors, rendered more difficult by China's policy ambiguity and volatility. Sill, China can be a positive long term influence in Asia, especially as it carries its market reforms to completion.     

构建河南投资与消费需求拉动经济增长模式研究

通过河南省近年来经济增长的基本态势、动力结构特征、投资与消费需求拉动河南经济增长过程中所起到的作用,将经济增长过程中这两大动力因素所发挥作用情况相对比,分析了河南省在投资需求动力要素方面存在着投资过热及其结构失衡,效益和驱动效应减弱等问题,在消费需求动力要素方面存在着消费需求增长乏力,消费率呈持续下跌态势等问题,结合我国宏观区域经济发展战略和河南省的实际,提出调整投资动力,改进和完善投资结构,培育和调整消费需求,使经济增长收敛于一个均衡增长的路径。     

江苏省经济增长与就业结构偏离研究

本文通过建立统计模型,运用数理统计的方法分析了江苏省各产业从业人员、地区生产总值和全社会固定资产投资之间的关系,反映了近年来江苏省就业增长状况的基本轮廊和江苏省近几年的经济发展与就业率相背离的现状,基于调整线性回归模型对经济增长率与就业增长率偏离的原因进行了分析,得出了保持经济适度快速增长,大力发展第三产业,开发人力资源,完善就业形式以促进就业增长等观点。