The Post‐Mao economic reform in China: A Korean view

Abstract

Previous studies that were concerned with the impact of depreciation of the ringgit on the Malaysian trade balance employed data either between Malaysia and rest of the world or between Malaysia and each of her major trading partners. Specifically, the bilateral trade balance between Malaysia and the US is shown to be insensitive to the real bilateral ringgit–dollar rate. In this article we wonder if disaggregating trade flows between Malaysia and the US by commodity could help us to discover any significant effects that the real exchange rate could have. We consider 101 industries that export from US to Malaysia and 17 industries that import from Malaysia. While majority of the industries showed short-run sensitivity to the real bilateral exchange rate, short-run effects lasted into the long run almost in half of the industries in both group.     

The trend of the Gini coefficient of China (1978–2010)

ABSTRACT

This study proposes a new approach to analyse the effects of an overlap term on the calculation of the overall Gini coefficient and estimates China’s Gini ratios since the adoption of the economic reform and open-door policies. A decomposition of the Chinese Gini coefficient for 1978–2010 reveals that the key factor contributing to income inequalities is the income disparity between rural and urban inhabitants. We further investigate the features of this income inequality between rural and urban areas and employ statistical approaches to evaluate the effects of urbanisation and rural-to-urban average income on nationwide income inequality. The results show that accelerating the pace of urbanisation is mainly responsible for decreasing China’s income disparity. Drawing on these results, we conclude with suggestions for related policies.     

Residual wage inequality in urban China, 1995–2007

We use three waves of urban household survey from 1995 to 2007 to investigate the trends of residual inequality and its determinants. First, we find that the enlargement in both the overall and residual inequality was larger at the upper half of the wage distributions between 2002 and 2007. Between 1995 and 2002, however, it is the lower half that experienced larger increase in inequality. Second, by using two complementary semi-parametric methods, we find that composition effect is negligible. Instead, the change in skill prices plays a dominant role in the rise of residual inequality. Finally, by constructing a panel data at the city level, we find that ownership restructuring is an important factor that has caused the skill price to rise, especially in the earlier period. Another finding is that China's export share of GDP has a positive effect on the enlargement of residual wage inequality, especially in the period from 2002 to 2007.     

Understanding the role of homeownership in wealth inequality: Evidence from urban China (1995–2018)

Many scholars have evaluated the wealth creation effects of homeownership over different time periods and have agreed on the positive role of homeownership. However, there are no consistent mechanisms to measure the impact of homeownership on wealth inequality. Based on data from 1995 to 2018, this paper finds that the expansion of the homeownership rate in urban China was an equalizing force in the distribution of wealth from 1995 to 2008, driven by the increased homeownership and housing acquisition of low- and moderate-income households (LMIs) during the era of housing reform in the 1990s. The forces were exogenous and dominated by a redistributive logic. In the post-reform era after 2008, the decline in the homeownership rate led to a concentration of wealth distribution that was driven by the widening wealth gap between owners and non-owners, which represented an endogenous market force. The results indicate that there was an apparent discontinuity of the trends of homeownership and wealth inequality because new immigrants could not afford the price of housing in the cities. The wealth position of the middle and lower classes (mainly new immigrant non-owners) was crippled, not only by the inaccessibility of homeownership, but also by the reinforcing effect of the increase in housing prices. This study reveals the different mechanisms of homeownership on wealth inequality and the policy implications for the redistributive effects of the allocation of housing resources.     

Deindustrialization and changes in manufacturing trade: Factor content calculations for 1978–1995

Input-output analysis is used to estimate the labor content embodied in changes in manufacturing output resulting from changing patterns of manufacturing trade. For ten OECD countries from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, changes in world trade of manufactures are estimated to have had a negative net effect on manufacturing employment of 3.5 million jobs, 2.0 million in the US alone, compared to a 6.2 million decline in actual manufacturing employment. The employment losses resulted mainly from North-South trade. At the industry level, there were large losses in labor-intensive industries and in industries that were strategically targeted by developing country industrial policies. There were employment losses in nearly all manufacturing industries, not a mixture of winners and losers. Such a pattern may result not from surging imports from the South but rather declining exports to the South in the aftermath of the 1980s debt crisis. JEL no. F14, F16, O24     

An Empirical Analysis of Provincial Productivity in China (1979–2001)

This study estimates and analyzes provincial productivity growth in China for the period 1979–2001. The Malmquist Index approach allows us to decompose productivity growth into two components, technological progress and efficiency change. Considerable productivity growth was found for most of the data period, but it was accomplished mainly through technological progress rather than efficiency improvement. Although China's capital stock has accumulated at record speed in recent years, our findings show that TFP growth slowed down significantly during 1995–2001. The study thus raises serious questions about whether China's recent growth pattern is consistent with its comparative advantages, and whether its reliance on capital accumulation can be sustained in the long run.     

What accounts for the decline in labor force participation among married women in urban China, 1991–2011?

Since the advent of Communist movement in the 1940s, women in China have been portrayed as equal partners to men in their labor force participation, operating under slogans such as “Women hold up half the sky”. Political rhetoric in the Mao era suggested that gender parity could be attained through women's participation in paid employment and full time work outside the home became routine for most urban women. Subsequent to the reforms, however, China has experienced a sharp decline in urban women's labor force participation. Utilizing micro-level data spanning from 1991 to 2011, individual women's labor force decisions are analyzed in order to identify the reasons for the decline. Changes in covariates explain only a small portion of the observed decline. However, over the study interval the wage returns to education increased markedly, and the distribution of wages widened considerably. These factors, combined with a high wage elasticity of participation, are consistent with the pattern of declining labor force participation found in the data. As such, promotion of women's education, particularly at the upper secondary level and beyond, could be expected to offset the downward trend.     

A View of the Occupational Structure in Imperial and Republican China (1640–1952)

Despite being considered a prime indicator of economic change, the occupational structure does not figure prominently in the debate regarding the economic development of early modern China. One reason is the virtual absence of occupational data before the start of the twentieth century. In this paper, we make a first attempt to sketch the occupational structure between ca. 1640 and 1952 using a variety of unique and rather fragmented occupational sources. We find that the share of persons working in agriculture remained stable until the mid-nineteenth century, with the share in industry showing some growth thereafter.     

New evidence on the role of regional clusters and convergence in China (1952–2008)

A new panel method is applied to the case of Chinese provinces to analyze the existence of club convergence in terms of per capita income, labor productivity, and capital intensity, from 1952 to 2008. The advantage of this approach is that it takes into account the heterogeneity of Chinese regions in a nonlinear time-varying framework, where more attention is paid to the spatial dimension. This time-varying approach outperforms other methods used in the relevant literature for an economy in transition, such as China, that has undergone a significant transformation over the period under consideration. Our results indicate that Chinese regions have converged into clubs. However, it is observed that Heilongjiang is diverging in terms of labor productivity and capital intensity, while Liaoning and Guizhou display similar patterns in terms of labor productivity, and Shanxi and Hebei in terms of capital intensity. These results indicate that specific economic packages need to be implemented in the clusters that were identified, with special attention to those regions that show a divergence behavior, in order to guarantee the sustainability and equality of regional growth.     

The sin of words: Censorship and self-censorship in China during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911)

This study examines the impact of a large-scale censorship campaign in Qing China (1644–1911) on intellectuals' writings. Using a Difference-in-Difference approach and analysing 23,000 poems, the study reveals a significant decrease in the frequency of censored words in poems written by censored intellectuals. There was no room to circumvent censorship by adopting homophones, split words, and variant characters. The machine learning analyses uncover some indication that the censorship campaign influenced intellectuals' writing styles, with intellectuals shifting away from the censored poetry. The campaign created intense political pressures, leading to self-censorship, but its long-term impact on word choices was minimal.     

The dynamics of capital assets in the economy of the Russian Federation over the post-Soviet period (1992–2015)

The authors have considered methods for an alternative assessment of the dynamics of capital assets over 1992–2015, which fundamentally differ from those employed by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), and have presented the results obtained on their basis. Losses of fixed assets incurred by the economy over this period in value terms have also been estimated. The reasons for the current crisis of the Russian economy have been shown in connection with the exhaustion of the Soviet material heritage and ways of handling the crisis have been proposed based on the reduction in household consumption and sharp increase in the share of accumulation and savings.     

Foreign Direct Investment(FDI)in China’s Mobile Telecommunications Sector

Introduction Ten years after China’ s accession to the World Trade Organisation(WTO),the country has emerged as a world economic powerhouse.By the end of 2010,China’ s foreign exchange reserves hit a record US$2.85 trillion(Wang,14 January 2011) and FDI in China rose to a record $US105.7 billion(Bloomberg News, 18 January 2011).Furthermore,China overtook Germany in 2009 as the world’s largest exporter and likely surpassed Japan to be the world’s second largest economy(Bloomberg News,18 January 2011 ).     

Urban mortality in Greece: Hermoupolis (1859–1940)

The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age-specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city.     

The innovation–trade nexus: Italy in historical perspective (1861–1939)

This work investigates the relationship between trade and technological specialisation in Italy, during the long time span ranging from Unification to the eve of the Second World War. To do this, new series of Italy’s indices of specialisation in trade and technology are calculated based on official data. Empirical analysis, based on Spearman rank correlation coefficients and fixed-effects regression, shows the emergence of a positive relationship between specialisation in technology and specialisation in trade after the start of the country’s modern economic growth, around the turn of the twentieth century. This, however, was uniquely driven by a negative relationship between technological specialisation and import shares, while no significant relationship between the former and export shares emerges. Furthermore, this finding excludes the most important sector, leading Italian industrialisation, that is, textiles, the outstanding performance of which can be seen as largely determined by its being particularly suited to the country’s factor endowment.     

Market-power versus cost-efficiency in Thailand's banking sector in the post-crisis period (1998–2011)

The degree of competition and effect of market concentration on interest rate margins in the banking sector of Thailand are estimated using the new empirical industrial organization model. We find that the collusive behavior and the market power of banks intensified during 2005–2011, after the East Asian financial crisis. Although the estimated benefit of scale economies resulting from increased concentration is statistically insignificant, its estimated impact would offset the unfavorable effect of higher market-power associated with higher concentration.     

Asian emerging-market currencies in the international debt market (1994–2014)

This paper investigates the increasing presence of Asian emerging-market currencies in the international debt market over the last two decades. I use the “original sin” index developed by Eichengreen et al. (The pain of original sin. 〈http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~;;eichengr/research/ospainaug21-03.pdf〉 (August, 2003) to measure the use of an economy's home currency in international debt relative to the total international debt of its residents. The relative reliance on home currency debt is seen to have increased markedly in a number of economies. Using a random effects Tobit model, I examine factors underlying recent changes for a sample of nine Asian emerging market economies. The results suggest the importance of economic size, strength of institutions, and financial market development.     

American & Foreign Power in Argentina and Brazil (1926–65)

The article analyses the evolution, strategies, and position of the American & Foreign Power company (AFP) in Argentina and Brazil from the mid-1920s to the second post-war period. We compare the economic performance and the strategies followed by this US group in different host economies, examining the relations between the US electricity firms and the governments of both countries that explain American & Foreign Power's withdrawal from Argentina and Brazil in 1959–65. The study is based upon the annual reports and proceedings of American & Foreign Power (1923–63) and other corporate reports, government statistics, and official reports from Argentina, Brazil, and the US.     

Visualising defence and war in economic history journals (1989–2018)

ABSTRACT

Economics usually takes for granted a peaceful world with peaceful market transactions, where war and conflict are anomalies to the current state of business life. However, as History shows violence is a pervasive phenomenon. How is the current state of the art of research on war and defence in economic history journals? This paper provides an overview of research published on this topic by a selection of economic history journals since the fall of Berlin wall. By means of bibliometric and cluster analysis, and using visualising analytical tools, we show the production, main topics, authors, sources, etc. on this research area, and compare with the treatment received in economic journals. The main findings are that publications in economic history journals have increased in the last decades; cover a list of themes broader than that in economic journals; give an increasing importance to quantitative techniques; cite sources from the same area as well as from the top economic journals; and show a relative lack of appeal to neighbouring disciplines. Although economics and economic history influence each other, the direction of the scientific knowledge is going mostly from economics towards economic history rather than the opposite.     

The evolution of wages in early modern Normandy (1600–1850)

This article presents new estimates of wages for Normandy between 1600 and 1850. We use a vast array of primary and secondary sources to assemble two new databases on wages and commodity prices to establish a new regional consumer price index (CPI) and twelve regional wage series. We find that unskilled labourers earned similar wages across the agricultural, maritime, and textile sectors. Historical evidence suggests that Norman employers grappled with a tight labour market, which placed more pressure on wage increases. We posit that this situation is best explained by the combination of the early fertility transition, resulting in slow demographic growth and the rapid development of the textile industry accelerated by the arrival of cotton. Finally, we also provide tentative evidence suggesting that labourers with stable employment could have earned a little less than their English counterparts during this period.