Financing China's Suburbanization: Capital Accumulation through Suburban Land Development in Hangzhou

China's rapid urbanization has resulted in substantial suburbanization over recent decades. However, limited research has been conducted into how land‐based capital is mobilized, accumulated and circulated within the circuits of the capital accumulation process, or how land‐based capital is used to finance massive investment in suburbanization by China's local governments, especially since the trend in land commodification during the 2000s. We examined the capital switching experience in the city of Hangzhou and our findings indicate that local governments have attempted to simultaneously strengthen housing development and industrial growth. In contrast to experiences of suburbanization in Western countries, a real estate boom during the early days of suburbanization in Hangzhou was not necessarily the result of diversion of excess capital from over‐accumulated investments in the manufacturing industry. Rather, it was a consequence of capital accumulation facilitated by land‐reserve systems and land‐based financing of infrastructure orchestrated by local government. Local governments and their affiliated land‐reserve centers and local investment platforms have acted as entrepreneurs by using profits from suburban property development to subsidize industrial investments and fund the infrastructure‐supported expansion of outer suburbs. These findings highlight the potential risks of land‐centered accumulation and provide important reflections upon the theory of David Harvey in the context of urban China.     

Geographic poverty traps? A micro model of consumption growth in rural China

How important are neighbourhood endowments of physical and human capital in explaining diverging fortunes over time for otherwise identical households in a developing rural economy? To answer this question we develop an estimable micro model of consumption growth allowing for constraints on factor mobility and externalities, whereby geographic capital can influence the productivity of a household's own capital. Our statistical test has considerable power in detecting geographic effects given that we control for latent heterogeneity in measured consumption growth rates at the micro level. We find robust evidence of geographic poverty traps in farm‐household panel data from post‐reform rural China. Our results strengthen the equity and efficiency case for public investment in lagging poor areas in this setting. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal density of radial major roads in a two-dimensional monocentric city with endogenous residential distribution and housing prices

This paper proposes an analytical urban system equilibrium model for optimizing the density of radial major roads in a two-dimensional monocentric city. The proposed model involves four types of agents: local authorities, property developers, households and household workers (i.e. commuters). The local authorities aim to maximize the total social welfare of the urban system by determining the optimal density of radial major roads in the city. The property developers seek to determine the intensity of their capital investment in the land market to maximize the net profit generated from the housing supply. The households choose residential locations that maximize their utility within a budget constraint, and the commuters choose the radial major roads that minimize their individual costs of travel between home and workplace. A heuristic solution procedure is developed to find the urban system equilibrium solution. A system optimum model is also proposed to optimize the density of radial major roads that maximizes the social welfare of the urban system. The proposed model can endogenously determine household residential distribution and land values across the city, along with the housing market structure in terms of housing prices and space. Numerical comparative static analyses of congestion pricing and road infrastructure investment (adding a new radial major road) are carried out together with evaluation of the effects of the service level of radial major roads, urban population size, and household income level on the urban economy.     

THE DESIGN OF MUNICIPAL DEVELOPMENT FUNDS

Municipal Development Funds (MDFs) have become the preferred means of many donors and, increasingly, national governments for the finance of urban infrastructure. This article assesses their performance and design based on extensive data collection on ten MDFs and recommends changes. MDFs have two overall goals: credit and development. The greatest appeal of MDFs as credit providers is that they can wholesale funds for a wide variety of small urban infrastructure project to many local governments. However, they have largely failed to move toward market principles, and, too often, have succeeded in building infrastructure without strategically promoting local development. In this context, donors have focus sed on gearing MDFs to promoting local development - improving project appraisal, rationalizing the inter-governmental transfer system, establishing capital budgeting and fiscal planning, distributing funds among regions and municipal-size categories, and promoting community participation. But MDFs have also produced uneven results in achieving these goals. At bottom, MDFs have failed to connect with local demand. Local governments often have little idea what local people - particularly poor communities - want and need. Not surprisingly, they often fail to accept or repay charges for MDF projects. The best hope for improving MDFs lies in relating these funds closer to local people's preferences. Means to this end include: involving neighborhood associations and households in project selection; relying on project revenues rather than transfers as the main guarantee and source for loan repayment; using commercial financial institutions to underwrite, disburse, and collect loans; and hiring community development staff at the MDF.     

Rent-seeking,promotion pressure and green economic efficiency: Evidence from China

Focusing on the quality and sustainability of urban economic development and using a panel dataset of 263 cities in China from 2004 to 2015, this paper regards each city as a production unit and uses the Epsilon-Based Measure approach to measure green economic efficiency by innovatively regarding labor, capital, land and energy as input factors, GDP as a desirable output, and environmental pollution emissions and land finance as undesirable outputs. Further, this paper examines the effect of rent-seeking on green economic efficiency with a fixed effects model and explores the role of promotion pressure in the relationship between rent-seeking and green economic efficiency with a panel threshold model. Our study finds that: (1) Rent-seeking exerts a significant negative impact on green economic efficiency. (2) Compared to areas of higher promotion pressure, the negative effect of rent-seeking on green economic efficiency is greater in areas facing lower promotion pressure. (3) The relationship among promotion pressure, rent-seeking and green economic efficiency differs in areas facing different “green” promotion pressure.     

Mobile Labor, Multiple Tax Instruments, and Tax Competition

The tax competition literature shows that local governments keep property tax rates inefficiently low to prevent capital outflows, thereby underproviding local public goods. This paper adds mobile labor and an alternative tax instrument to the model. Jurisdictions have access to a property tax levied on land and capital, plus either a head tax or a labor tax. Scale economies in public good provision create incentives to use the property tax, but these incentives are not accompanied by increased incentives to underprovide public goods. In contrast, underprovision is associated with the use of a distortionary labor tax.     

Tax Competition and Revelation of Preferences for Public Expenditure

This paper considers a federal country composed of local jurisdictions that differ in their inhabitants' tastes for public goods, and which finance local public expenditure through a source-based tax on capital income. The taste for public goods is the private information of local governments. The central government seeks an optimal policy, in which grants to local governments are conditioned on local tax rates. The uninformed central government seeks both to allocate capital efficiently among jurisdictions, and to induce jurisdictions to provide an efficient mix of private and public consumption. It is shown that there persist at this constrained optimum both some misallocation of capital and some violation of the Samuelson rule for optimal public good provision in every jurisdiction.     

政府效率对地区承接离岸服务外包的影响

本文构建了高质量发展背景下地区政府效率对承接离岸服务外包的影响机制,并基于首批服务外包示范城市样本开展实证检验。实证研究发现：地区政府效率对承接离岸服务外包具有高度显著的“U”型非线性影响。此外,政府效率对承接离岸服务外包的影响受到地区产业结构高度化水平、基础设施建设水平和人力资源禀赋水平的调节作用,上述因素与政府效率共同对地区承接离岸服务外包的规模发挥“协同效应”。分样本回归的结果进一步揭示在不同资源禀赋的区域样本中,政府效率对承接离岸服务外包的影响具有显著的异质性。基于上述结论,本文提出如下政策启示：持续优化政府效率,进一步释放制度红利;强化产业发展、基础设施和人力资源的“协同效应”;提高服务外包层次,优化服务外包结构;推动地区协调发展。     

Endogenous International Technology Spillovers and Biased Technical Change in Agriculture

This paper analyzes trade-related knowledge flows from an innovating country to other countries. It is assumed that knowledge is embodied in commodities traded between countries and that the potential productivity of this knowledge is determined by the local usability of foreign technologies. The usability of foreign knowledge is dependent on the local absorption capacity (such as knowledge infrastructure and human capital) and on structural differences (factor endowments or climate) between countries. In agriculture, a large portion of the knowledge is embodied in inputs which cause factor-biased technical change in the receiving sectors. Trade-related knowledge transmission is introduced in an applied multi-region general equilibrium model (GTAP) to study the macro-economic and sectoral impacts of knowledge spillovers and of trade policies. Endogenous embodied technology spillovers bear some important implications for trade policy, because protective measures preclude countries not only from cheaper imports but also from foreign technologies.     

Competition for private capital and central grants: the case of Japanese industrial parks

Local governments invest in public infrastructure to develop their regions. When they depend on intergovernmental grants for local development and have opportunities to lobby upper-level governments for such grants, horizontal intergovernmental competition in lobbying activity may emerge in addition to competition over public infrastructure. This paper empirically examines the existence of these interactions between Japanese localities, by using data on the value of industrial parks as infrastructure provisions and on personnel interchanges between the central and local governments as a measure of lobbying activity. Our results suggest that a Japanese local government’s choice of the size of industrial parks and its invitation to central officers to act as a director on loan are positive responses to the neighboring local government’s policy choices. As the value of the industrial parks in a district is affected by the neighboring districts’ lobby activities and their industrial park values, we can interpret these results as evidence of inter-regional competition in these two dimensions, rather than control by the central government in this unitary state.     

地利共享:土地财政的制度合法性

土地财政作为地方政府财政收入的重要来源,成为地方政府提供基础设施建设和社会公共服务的物质基础。在城市化的快速发展中,土地财政成为必不可少的动力。随着城市化进程的加速,土地管理法的修订,土地财政的合法性颇受争议。从合法性的制度视角看,地利共享是土地制度合法性源泉,体现在规制性、规范性和认知性三方面。但是,土地财政的地利共享合法性也面临着规制上的多变和复杂,规范上的迷离和离散,认知上的背离与缺失三方面的危机。化解土地财政的合法性危机,需要对土地财政地利共享的合法性进行重塑:规制层面上,完善土地管理法律体系,坚持土地使用的宪法底线;规范层面上,坚持土地改革的局部试点,谨慎推行全局式的土地改革策略;认知层面上,完善土地财政使用渠道,探索更加多样的土地增值分配方式。     

The Role of Built,Human, Social,and Natural Capital in Determining Land Values,and the Influence of Demographics upon this Relationship

Abstract

We use various statistical methods to compare the extent to which different households are willing to invest in and pay for access to four types of capital—built, human, natural, and social. We further assess to what extent such preferences can be predicted by a measure of neighbourhood demographics. We develop indicators for each of the four types of capital at the census block group level for Baltimore, MD, USA. We use analysis of variance to examine differences in these indicators between demographic groups and multiple linear regression to examine the influence on unimproved land values of the four types of capital.     

Local taxation and the consequences of revenue distribution patterns

The economy of a small region. is modeled as an eighteen-equation system describing production, consumption, income distribution, factor supply, and a government sector. The government uses: independent taxes on land rents and capital rentals to collect revenue equal to 20% of what land rents would be in an untaxed equilibrium and distributes the revenue to local residents in four different patterns. The distribution of the tax revenue, as well as the mobility of the factor taxed, generates distinct patterns of impacts on regional population, capital stock and production structure wages rents and the incidence of the taxes.     

Inequality and catching-up under decreasing marginal impatience

This paper examines how endogenous time preference interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households with intrinsic inequality (e.g., capitalists and workers), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households than an egalitarian one in which every household owns an equal share of asset; (ii) poor households tend to benefit more under DMI than CMI (constant marginal impatience) from positive shocks; (iii) inequality exhibits a sharp inverted-U shape as more people become rich, which should be good news for developing countries in catching up; and (iv) a tax on capital income reduces poor households’ income when the fraction of the rich is sufficiently small. We also examine immigration and discuss capital mobility.     

土地财政、政府行为与企业杠杆率——基于中国上市企业数据的实证检验

土地财政能够在经济实践中对微观企业主体产生重要影响.土地财政强度越大,则能够显著推动企业杠杆率水平上升,对于国有企业和高科技企业而言更是如此.从机制路径来看,宏观上,土地财政会强化地方政府的干预能力,强化基础设施建设强度;微观上,土地财政导致企业的融资难和融资贵问题加剧,并降低了企业的内部控制水平,这些都导致了企业杠杆...     

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), tenure choice,and residential land use

This paper extends the standard, urban, residential land-use model to analyze the effects of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance. On the demand side, households are differentiated by income and tenure; on the supply side, the cost of housing is related to the asset prices of land and structure and the cost of capital. Hypothesizing that capital cost is a function of household tenure and income, tenure is chosen to minimize this cost. The effect of FHA, then, is to expand the housing consumption of moderate-middle income households, by reducing their capital cost, while displacing those whose cost is not reduced.     

The Capitalization of Public Services and Amenities into Land Prices — Empirical Evidence from German Communities

Applying the hedonic approach to land prices, this article investigates the capitalization of public services and pure amenities in a cross section of German communities. Possible spillover effects from neighboring municipalities are explicitly included in the analysis and prove to be of considerable importance. Estimates of the impacts of local attributes on land prices are obtained taking into account the spatial structure among unobserved variables. The results confirm that differences in land prices are largely attributable to local conditions and policies. This implies a significant degree of mobility as well as high estimation of local attributes on the part of German households.     

地方国企非效率投资来源选择：债权资金优先还是股权资金优先？

以2001—2009年地方国有上市公司为样本对地方国企非效率投资来源选择进行研究,结果显示：地方国企非效率投资来源选择首先是债权资金,其次才是股权资金;当拥有较多长期贷款时,企业会更倾向使用债权资金代替股权资金,并且这种选择是理性和不可逆的;在产权保护较强和信贷配置市场化程度较低的地区,企业选择债权资金替代股权资金的动机更强;随着政府干预的增强,债权资金对股权资金的替代作用减弱。     

Public procurement in the presence of capital taxation

This paper considers governments’ public procurement decisions as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of local production and to attract taxable capital. As a result, governments may prefer domestic firms to more efficient foreign firms.     

地方政府土地出让目标取向研究

目前我国地方政府在土地出让中,以土地收益极大化和招商引资作为双元目标取向,对地方财政、土地资源配置和社会稳定等造成不利影响.借鉴国际经验以及按照政府的双重身份和科学发展观的要求,地方政府土地出让的目标应为促进城市土地合理利用和适度土地收益,应采取相应政策措施消除地方政府土地出让目标扭曲的客观基础,促进土地出让目标和行为的合理化.