The International Effects of China’s Growth,Trade and Education Booms

China’s international trade flows have increased by 500 per cent since 1992, far outstripping GDP growth. Likewise tertiary education enrolments have increased by 300 per cent. We simulate these changes using a multi‐sector growth model of the Chinese and USA economies. A decade of trade biased growth in China is found to raise USA GDP by approximately 3–4.5 percentage points and has a large impact on the demand for tertiary education in China. Despite these positive effects of growth, the results suggest that the expansion of China’s education sector per se has practically no long‐run impact on the USA economy.     

China’s Macroeconomic Imbalances: Causes and Consequences

In recent years, China has experienced two forms of extreme macroeconomic imbalance: an expenditure imbalance in the sense of very high investment and very low consumption, giving rise to rapid capital accumulation; and an imbalance between expenditure and production, producing external imbalance, i.e. a huge surplus on the current account of the balance of payments. Both imbalances imply a low rate of time discount by both government and society: consumption in the present is forgone in favour of consumption in the future. The paper examines how these imbalances came about and goes on to consider whether they can be sustained and how they might be redressed. There is no evidence that the rapid capital accumulation has reduced the rate of profit on capital and thus the incentive to invest. However, persistent external imbalance poses a threat to investment if it generates excess liquidity and asset bubbles. The current account surplus rose remarkably in the years 2004–07. This was associated with exogenous increases in competiveness and in saving, both attributable to the economic reform policies. On current policies, the surplus is likely to rise again once the world economy recovers from its recession. This poses three sorts of problems, each of which is examined in turn: difficulties for macroeconomic stabilisation policies; risk of capital loss on the foreign exchange holdings; and the threat of retaliation by China’s trading partners. A combination of internal and external policies will be required to redress the imbalance.     

Trade Liberalisation and Economic Growth

There has been a long‐held belief that there is an association between economic growth and increased levels of international trade. However, more recent work has questioned this hypothesis and the re‐opening of the debate has identified two key areas of contention. One is the extent to which the effects of openness are conditional on factors omitted from the core regression relationship and hence how the hypothesis is tested. The other is the meaning and measurement of openness and liberalisation. This paper addresses both these areas by exploring the nature of heterogeneity in growth performance among liberalising countries using a difference‐in‐difference approach. The results show that, while in aggregate there appears to be a positive but small impact of trade liberalisation on growth, this masks a huge range of responses. Empirical analysis of this heterogeneity shows that a one‐size‐fits‐all policy is not necessarily the most effective, and suggests a case‐by‐case approach is more appropriate.     

China’s Growing Influence in Southeast Asia – Monetary Policy and Equity Markets

This study analyses the potential transmission of China’s monetary policy shocks to equity markets in Southeast Asia. Impulse response functions indicate that the impact of a monetary expansion in China is significant and positive for four of the five Southeast Asian equity markets. One explanation for this result is that monetary policy shocks in China lead to an increase in demand for goods and services in both China and abroad, which then shows up in the foreign equity market. The results in this paper provide evidence of China’s influence in Southeast Asia and its financial markets. The transmission effect is small and very short lived, but can be expected to increase if the current trends of a deepening economic integration between China and Southeast Asia and a maturing Chinese central bank continue.     

China’s Foreign Trade: Perspectives From the Past 150 Years

This paper studies the trade of China in the past 150 years, starting from the first opening of China after the Opium War. The main purpose of the paper is to identify what is (and was) China’s ‘normal’ level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under different trade regimes, from 1840 to the present. We present new evidence on China’s foreign trade during the treaty port era (1842–1948), drawn from disaggregated trade data collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, that yields important findings for current research. First, although the volume of foreign trade remained limited initially, there was a notable expansion in the diversity of products, with many new goods being imported into China. Second, the regional diffusion of foreign goods through China was greatly facilitated by the expansions of the port system. Third, the importance of Hong Kong as an intermediary in China’s trade has undergone long‐term fluctuations suggestive of learning effects. China’s recent wave of liberalization has led by the early 1990s to a trade level comparable to the high of the 1920s. While much of China’s recent growth in world trade is in line with her income growth, there is no doubt that China’s trade openness today, comparable by some measures to Denmark’s, is a stunning reversal relative to the pre‐1978 and also the pre‐1840 period. The paper emphasises the roles that history and institutional change have played in this.     

Banks,Financial Liberalisation and Financial Crises in Emerging Markets

The East Asian financial crisis has raised a series of important issues. Amongst them is the question of the role of the banking sector and financial liberalisation in contributing to financial crises. How do weaknesses in the domestic banking sector, when combined with both domestic and international financial liberalisation, engender currency crises? What is lacking in the literature is a simple conceptual framework within which these connections can be conceptualised and drawn out and in which the role of banks is explicitly discussed. This paper seeks to provide just such a framework. Within it, international financial liberalisation can be seen as fuelling a boom in domestic credit, which leads to acute balance sheet problems for domestic banks, and exposes the country concerned to a currency crisis in the event of a sudden reversal of capital inflows, which banking weaknesses may itself trigger.     

经济成长、金融结构变革与证券公司的未来发展

进入21世纪以来,中国经济的快速增长对经济生活的方方面面都产生了深刻的影响,也为中国资本市场带来了新的历史转折期和重要机遇期。作为资本市场上金融服务主要提供者的证券公司,迎来了新的发展机遇。然而在中国,什么样的证券公司能在激烈的竞争中发展壮大?什么样的证券公司拥有未来?本文认为,有三点至关重要:第一,对中国经济未来发展趋势和特点要有系统分析;第二,对中国金融结构的演变规律和方向要有准确把握;第三,要具有自身独特的核心竞争力。本文对这三个方面的内容进行系统研究,并提出了一些见解。     

区域金融发展与经济增长

金融发展与经济增长关系问题的研究越来越深入。以陕西省为研究对象,侧重于金融发展与经济增长关系的经济基础和关联机制,通过两部门模型,揭示金融发展影响经济增长的两个方式:外部性和部门要素边际生产力差异,陕西省的实证检验结果表明,以银行贷款为测度指标的金融发展与经济长期增长间存在显著的正向关系,金融发展对经济增长存在显著的正外部性。     

中国金融业高增长:成因与风险

近年来,中国金融业表现出一种高增长态势,这种高增长是传统宏观调控手段与中国经济新常态的特征不匹配、金融创新快速推进与监管改革相对滞后不协调、股票市场剧烈波动与房地产价格新一轮上涨相结合等诸多矛盾的集中体现.特别值得警惕的是,金融业的这一轮高增长是在制造业快速下滑的背景下发生的,反映出金融运行效率的低下,意味着金融稳定、可持续发展的基础正在丧失,预示着风险爆发的可能性正在提高.妥善应对这一变化,需要进一步深化金融改革和改进金融监管,为实体经济发展创造良好的金融环境.同时,学术界也应该反思并深入研究我国金融发展的特点与规律,为维护金融安全提供理论基础.     

Economic Diplomacy and International Trade: ASEAN’s Quest to Value‐Claim

Utilising economic diplomacy theory, this study specifies a statistical model to reveal ASEAN members’ capacity to negotiate better international trade outcomes. Examining imports into ASEAN members from 134 nations between 1980 and 2001, we find that ASEAN’s diplomats were able to pursue more ‘value‐claiming’ in economic diplomacy than expected. While our results support the commonly accepted view in economic diplomacy that smaller nations are pressured to accept trade outcomes desired by larger nations, we also find support for a new perspective: smaller nations obtain more favourable trade outcomes, as members of a regional trade bloc, which cannot be achieved as individual nations. We find that ASEAN’s conversion to a fully fledged regional trade agreement in 1992 significantly enhanced this capacity. This study adds a different perspective to the substantial literature examining cases in trade and economic diplomacy.     

Trade Liberalisation,Economic Development and Poverty Alleviation

In a distinguished career spanning more than four decades, Jagdish Bhagwati has made numerous contributions to both trade theory and trade policy analysis. The current paper focuses on Bhagwati's major contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding the influence of trade liberalisation upon economic development and its potential to alleviate poverty in the world's poorest economies. In order to highlight Bhagwati's contributions in these fields we focus on the arguments developed in two of his numerous landmark publications; first his seminal 1964 paper on the Pure Theory of International Trade and, second, his 2004 book entitled In Defense of Globalization. Although separated in time by some four decades we argue that these two publications, despite their very different characters, each demonstrate beyond doubt the significance of Bhagwati's work in improving our understanding of the true nature of international trade and its potential to address questions of global poverty.     

我国金融发展与经济增长之因果关系研究

本文采用多元Near-VAR方法对我国1952-2003年间的经济增长、金融发展以及影响经济增长的其他指标之间的关系进行了实证分析,模型指标是否平稳是建立在考虑经济中存在结构变化的单位根检验结果的基础上.研究结果显示,在样本期内,我国金融发展与经济增长间存在着由经济增长到金融发展的单向因果关系."中国经济增长引导金融发展"假说以及金融发展指标是围绕着结构断点的分段趋势平稳等结论,具有重要的政策启示.     

Financial Structure,Corporate Finance and Economic Growth

This paper examines how a country’s financial structure affects economic growth through its impact on how corporations raise and manage funds. We define a country’s financial structure to consist of the institutions, financial technology and rules of the game that define how financial activity is organized at a point in time. We emphasize that the aspects of financial structure that encourage entrepreneurship are not the same as those that ensure the efficiency of established firms. Financial structures that permit the development of specialized capital by financial intermediaries are crucial to economic growth.     

新型农村金融机构与农村经济增长

新型农村金融机构经过四年的发展,是否达到设立初期银监会、人民银行所要实现的目标吸引各界广泛关注。从我国新型农村金融机构"服务三农"的视角出发建立计量经济学模型,本文运用邹氏检验,发现新型农村金融机构的发展对我国农村经济的发展起到了较好的促进作用,不仅完善了我国金融体系,也更好地支持了"三农"服务,所以还应加大业务建设、明确市场定位和增强政策支持。