Political connections and higher education

Do political connections affect investment in human capital? This paper studies the higher education decisions of politically connected and unconnected students during China's economic transition. Using the sequential introduction of reforms, I show that economic liberalization increased tertiary educational attainment, as well as sorting of students into different degree types depending on family background. Students whose parents were members of the Chinese Communist Party selected into relatively less prestigious vocational colleges with lower admissions standards. In contrast, politically unconnected individuals responded to the higher skill premium following the reforms by studying harder to obtain more demanding and sought‐after university degrees.     

The institutional foundation of China's economic growth

China's economic growth is (undoubtedly, undeniably, unquestionably) regarded as a miracle due to the changes it has brought to the lives of the Chinese as well as to the global economic structure. This paper analyzes China's economic growth from the perspective of institutional reforms. The main argument is that, through the redefinition of property rights, the operation costs of China's planned economy under full public ownership have been reduced dramatically. Human resources have greatly improved in terms of productivity and creativity, thus providing China with competitive advantages in the global market.     

COMMUNITY PROPERTY AUCTION,NASH BIDDING RULE AND CHINA'S RURAL ECONOMIC REFORM

In this paper we present a model based on the auction theory for community properties and its possible application to China's economic reforms. We derive the Nash bidding rule for the first price sealed‐bid auction of a community‐owned object, and compare it with the bidding rule for auctions of a privately‐owned object. Moreover, we argue that in the process of China's economic reforms, auctioning off the community‐owned properties to private owners is the optimal way to achieve economic efficiency together with social equity. This paper has obvious implications for China's reforms relating to commercializing its rural land and other community property.     

Government grants,private R&D funding and innovation efficiency in transition economy

Although the development of the high-tech industry is part of the national agenda of many countries, particularly transition economies, few studies have analysed innovation efficiency in countries with environments unfavourable to high-tech industry development. This study explores the relationships of government grants, private R&D funding and innovation efficiencies of the high-tech industry in China. We use a stochastic frontier analysis model to study the roles of government and market mechanisms in high-tech industry innovation from 1995 to 2008. Findings show that government grants do not crowd out private funding, but stimulate private R&D expenditure. Private R&D funding has positively influenced innovation in the Chinese high-tech industry, and efficiency potentials are widely under-exploited. Additionally, government grants are observed to negatively impact innovation by large firms in the Chinese high-tech industry. Furthermore, we reveal that human capital can promote the innovation performance of high-tech firms, excepting those of medium scale. The findings provide insightful perspectives on China's high-tech industry.     

China's New Role in the International Financial Architecture

The rise of China is challenging the international financial architecture in a number of ways. This paper highlights three that are of critical importance: the challenge of absorbing massive Chinese savings; the incorporation of China into a cohesive global financial safety net; and the organisation of China's participation in funding the demand for international investment projects. The global financial architecture needs to be reformed. But what role should China play? The paper defines the options open to China and the opportunities and barriers it will face. We argue that China can work with the established economic powers in reforming the existing architecture. At the same time, China seeks cooperation in building new institutions and organisations that fill gaps in the existing arrangements. But no matter how international financial diplomacy plays out in the near term, deep financial and economic reform at home will alone deliver China a central role in the international financial architecture. Domestic reform could also attend to some of the challenges that currently plague China's impact on the system. The success or failure of these domestic reforms will be at the crux of the strength or fragility of the international financial architecture in the years ahead.     

Understanding china's economic performance

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978: the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. Specifically, the resulting non-capitalist institutions are claimed to be successful in (a) agriculture where land is not owned by the fanners; (b) township and village enterprises (TVEs) which are owned collectively by rural communities; and (c) state owned enterprises (SOEs) where increased competition and increased wage incentive, but not privatization, have been emphasized.

The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation for the rapid growth. China had a high population density heavily concentrated in low-wage agriculture, a condition that was favorable for labor-intensive export-led growth in other parts of East Asia. The convergence school also holds that China's gradualism results primarily from a lack of consensus over the proper course, with power still divided between market reformers and old-style socialists; and that the “innovative” non-capitalist institutions are responses to China's political circumstances and not to its economic circumstances.

Perhaps the best test of the two approaches is whether China's policy choices are in fact leading to institutions harmonized with normal market economies or to more distinctive innovations. In this regard, the recent policy trend has been towards institutional harmonization rather than institutional innovation, suggesting that the government accepts that the ingredients for a dynamic market economy are already well-known.     

Labour Unrest in the Global Political Economy: The Case of China's 2010 Strike Wave

This paper argues that whilst the relationship between US consumerism and China's low-wage production has underpinned China's economic growth in recent years, policy-makers are increasingly cognisant of heightened internal and external vulnerabilities, namely increased domestic social unrest and downturns in US demand. Despite calls for increased domestic consumption, opinion remains divided as to the extent to which policy-makers will make a genuine departure with China's export-orientation. This paper argues, however, that the direction of the Chinese political economy will depend much on the transformative role of workers’ struggles. Placed in a broader north-east Asian comparative perspective, we argue that China appears to be on the verge of a transition towards a limited labour supply, as evidenced in increasing labour shortages, rising wages costs and new forms of labour unrest. An in-depth case study of the strike at Nanhai Honda in 2010 suggests that China's migrant workers are beginning to develop a class consciousness and move from reactive to proactive demands. Furthermore, the response of the Chinese state and employers has shifted from one of outright repression to one of accommodation. These trends are likely to be highly significant in terms of China's uneven integration into the global economy.     

Evaluating Partial Reforms in the Chinese State Industrial Sector: a stochastic frontier cost function approach

China's phenomenal economic growth since 1979 is seen by many as a challenge to the belief that the clarification of property rights is a necessary step of successful transition from a planned economy to a market economy. Instead of mass and rapid privatization, reforms in the Chinese state industrial sector in the 1980s were attempted to reconstruct the incentive structure of enterprises by linking rewards to performance, expanding managerial freedom and exposing enterprises to market influences. This paper investigates the extent to which the partial reforms have transformed the behaviour and performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Using a panel of observations on 769 SOEs from ten manufacturing industries during 1980 and 1989, a stochastic cost frontier function is estimated to measure the effect of various reform measures on both technical and allocative efficiency. We found that the average cost efficiency level increased by 1.18% per annum during the decade. The efficiency effects of the industrial reform programme are mixed. While performance-related bonuses and market competition appear to have had the intended impact, there is evidence that devolution of decision-making power to the firm level has led to deterioration in efficiency. Therefore, although the partial reforms have met with some success, the issue of an adequate structure of incentives for SOEs remains unresolved.     

Conditional heteroscedasticity with leverage effect in stock returns: Evidence from the Chinese stock market

In recent years the Chinese stock market has experienced an astonishing growth and unprecedented development, but is also viewed as one of the most volatile markets, which has been called by many observers a “casino”. This study intends to examine the presence of heteroskedasticity and the leverage effect in the Chinese stock markets, and to capture the dynamics of conditional correlation between returns of China's stock markets and those of the U.S. in a bivariate VC-MGARCH framework. The results show that the leverage effect is significant in these markets during the sample period in 2000–2013, and the conditional correlation between mainland China's and the U.S. stock markets is quite low and highly volatile. The Chinese stock markets are found to be highly regimes persistent. These findings have important implication for investors seeking opportunity of portfolio diversification.     

出口国技术水平与进口国知识产权保护的互动效应对出口国出口贸易的影响——基于中国出口贸易的实证

利用2007—2014年中国对112个国家出口贸易的面板数据,实证研究了中国技术水平、进口国知识产权保护及两者的交互效应对中国出口贸易的影响。结果显示:中国技术水平与高收入进口国知识产权保护的交互效应对中国出口贸易的影响显著为负,而与低收入进口国知识产权保护的交互效应的影响并不显著。这说明,中国出口产品技术水平的提升,对高收入进口国企业的威胁加大,迫使其建立更严苛的贸易壁垒,抑制中国企业出口。     

China's Fiscal Decentralization and Regional Economic Growth

The present paper applies Lucas's theory of endogenous growth and Stiglitz's theory of local public goods to build an econometric model consisting of five simultaneous equations to study China's fiscal decentralization effects on regional economic growth. The model is estimated by two‐stage least squares using a set of panel data on 31 Chinese provinces during 1996–2005. The estimated results show that China's fiscal decentralization increased the local governments' expenditure on physical infrastructure and education, which led to the rising local physical capital stock and human capital levels, respectively, and then resulted in the growth of regional economies.     

The saving–growth–inequality triangle in China

China's fast growth is perceived as a major determinant of its savings glut that contributes to global imbalances, but China's income inequality has been largely overlooked as the economy moves rapidly toward the Kuznets curve peak. This paper provides a new explanation for the complex issue of Chinese saving using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model. We find that China's growth is positively affected by saving but has a limited effect on saving, that inequality mainly has a negative impact on growth but has a positive impact on saving, and that inequality is a stronger factor than growth in explaining high saving. Therefore, inequality must be mitigated to lower the high saving rate in China, and growth will be unaffected by lowering both inequality and saving.     

The effects of trade,aid, and investment on China's image in Latin America

Using repeated cross-sectional survey data, we analyze whether China's growing economic engagement in Latin America has an effect on citizens’ perceptions of China within 18 Latin American countries over the 2002–2013 period. Our instrumental-variables regressions exploit exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese exports, aid, and investment. Specifically, we use China's market penetration of developing countries outside of Latin America as the instrumental variable. In contrast to the widespread criticism, we do not find evidence that China's growing economic activities in the respective countries diminish average attitudes towards China—neither at the national nor at the provincial level. However, China's economic engagement appears to contribute to more polarized opinions on China: more individuals develop either very positive or very negative opinions on China. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that China's economic engagement creates winners and losers.     

Finance and inequality: Channels and evidence

We provide a framework to interpret the recent literature on financial development and inequality. In many developing countries, access to funding and financial services by firms and households is still very skewed. Recent evidence suggests that poor access does not only reflect economic constraints but also barriers erected by insiders. Inequality affects the distribution of political influence, so financial regulation often is easily captured by established interests in unequal countries. Captured reforms deepen rather than broaden access, as small elites obtain most of the benefits while risks are socialized. Financial liberalization motivated to increase access may in practice increase fragility and inequality, and lead to political backlash against reforms. Thus financial reforms may succeed only if matched by a buildup in oversight institutions. Journal of Comparative Economics 35 (4) (2007) 748–773.     

The Nature of China's Economic Growth in the Past Two Decades

The Chinese economy has grown at record rates since the start of the market-oriented reforms in 1978. Motivated by the Asian productivity debate, this article provides an assessment of the role of total factor productivity in China's economic growth in the past two decades. We identify four main factors in the productivity growth: efficiency gain at the micro level; improvement in resource allocation; diffusion of technology through foreign direct investment; and improvement in infrastructure. We also argue that further state-owned enterprise and banking reforms, an emerging entrepreneurial class and greater research and development efforts are additional driving forces for the medium to long-term total factor productivity growth in China.     

A great wall of patents: What is behind China's recent patent explosion?

China's patent surge, documented in this paper, is seemingly paradoxical given the country's weak record of protecting intellectual property rights. Using a firm-level data set that spans the population of China's large and medium-size industrial enterprises, this paper explores the factors that account for China's rising patent activity. While the intensification of research and development in the Chinese economy tracks with patenting activity, it explains only a fraction of the patent explosion. The growth of foreign direct investment in China is prompting Chinese firms to file for more patent applications. Amendments to the patent law that favor patent holders and ownership reform that has clarified the assignment of property rights also emerge as significant sources of China's patent boom. These results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over-dispersion in the patent counts data and firm heterogeneity.     

Technological change and China's regional disparities — A calibrated equilibrium analysis

We in this paper assess the impacts of technological change on China's regional disparities using a general equilibrium model of multiple regions and multiple sectors. We use the most recent available Chinese interregional data to calibrate the model parameters for 1987 and 2000. We then assess the impacts of neutral, biased, and aggregate technological changes on China's regional disparity by conducting counterfactual experiments. The results generally suggest that China's overall technological change between 1987 and 2000 has increased China's regional disparities. The results also suggest that neutral technological change reduces China's regional disparities while biased technological change increases disparities and the influences of the latter outweigh those of the former and the net effects of technological changes on regional disparities are increasing.     

Overseas Impacts of China's Outward Direct Investment

China's outward direct investment (ODI) has grown rapidly since 2004. But along with such phenomenal growth is a mixed feeling toward Chinese investments in host countries. This article explores some overseas impacts of Chinese ODI based on an analysis of China's policy environment and investment patterns. We argue that what Chinese investors bring to host economies includes (i) massive job creation, but limited technology transfers to the local economy; (ii) ample capital as well as entry into the Chinese market; and (iii) damage from corporate social misbehavior. However, we suspect that these overseas impacts may be transitory as three dynamics, increased conflicts, accelerated learning and China's domestic structural changes, are simultaneously set in motion.     

Growth and dynamics of Australia's education exports

Australia is the third largest global exporter of education services and generated $18.6 billion in 2009–2010. The education sector ranks as the top services exports and number three of all export earners in recent years after coal and iron ore. This study analyses the major determinants of Australia's education exports. Using the Johansen cointegration technique, a stable long run relationship is found between education export earnings, real exchange rate, world income and terms of trade. It is also found that policy reforms relating to opening up the education sector from the mid 1980s had a positive growth effect on the sector.     

Trade liberalisation,market competition and wage inequality in China's manufacturing sector

Economic reforms of the late 1980s have contributed to rapid economic growth in China. While the overall standard of living has improved, economic growth has also resulted in an increase in income inequality. Rising income inequality can increase social tensions that can impede further economic growth. By making use of firm level panel data, this paper focuses on the impact of increased market competition and trade liberalisation on skilled–unskilled wage inequality in China's manufacturing sector. A theoretical model is used to argue that trade liberalisation and market competition can affect skilled–unskilled wage inequality. Based on this result, an econometric model is specified. The empirical analysis presented in this paper shows that increased trade liberalisation has contributed to an increase in skilled–unskilled wage inequality in China's manufacturing sector. However, increase in market competition has the opposite effect.