Effect of promotion pressure and financial burden on investment in public–private partnership infrastructure projects in China

By identifying the political motives of officials and local governments, this study aims to provide a new political economic analysis framework for understanding China's incentives for investing in public–private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects. Chinese urban panel data for the period 2013–17 were used to examine the mechanisms of promotion pressure and financial burden in relation to investments in PPP infrastructure projects. Based on our findings, the following policy recommendations are proposed: standardise the behaviour of local government officials in promoting PPP projects, establish a lifelong accountability mechanism for PPP project performance, establish a mechanism for local government debt risk assessment and prevention, and avoid the risk of local debt arising from over‐investment in PPP infrastructure projects. Moreover, a match should be formed between local economic infrastructure planning and investment plans to avoid over‐ or under‐investment.     

Tax Incentives and Maturity Mismatch between Investment and Financing: Evidence from China

This paper examines the effects of China's accelerated depreciation policy (ADP) on the maturity mismatch between investment and financing. Using panel data for China's A-share nonfinancial listed companies from 2010 to 2019 and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we found the following. First, ADP significantly aggravated the degree of corporate maturity mismatch, and this result was robust across multiple checks. Second, due to an insufficient long-term loan supply, firms had to finance the fixed investments induced by ADP with short-term debts, leading to maturity mismatches. Third, the positive policy effects were mainly significant for firms with high policy exposure, high-risk preferences, a high degree of information asymmetry, and firms with weak long-term financing capacity. Finally, maturity mismatch exacerbated corporate financial risks. Our research findings indicate that passive maturity mismatch is prevalent among Chinese companies and emphasize the need to address financial repression in order to mitigate the potential financial risks that may arise from tax incentives.     

Human capital in the financial sector and corporate debt maturity

This study examines how human capital in the financial sector affects corporate debt maturity. To illustrate the mechanisms underlying the effects, we propose a theoretical framework that highlights the effects of human capital in the financial sector on mitigating the information asymmetry between financial intermediaries, households, and firms. Using the Chinese National Economic Census in 2008 and the Industrial Enterprises Database over 2011–2013, we find that the financial sector's human capital plays a significant and positive (negative) role in short-term (long-term) debt and this effect is more pronounced for firms with greater information asymmetry. Further analyses demonstrate that the baseline findings are consistent with the credit supply hypothesis. Our study indicates that human capital in the financial sector strengthens its renegotiation capacity for corporate borrowing, which is consistent with China's financial repression policy and leads to increased exposure of firms to credit and liquidity risks.     

Fiscal Consolidation and the Public Sector Balance Sheet in South Africa

Between 1994 and 2008 the South African government reduced its debt/GDP ratio from almost 50% to 27%. Unfortunately this reduction was accompanied by a significant decrease in government's fixed capital/GDP ratio from 90% to 55% – fiscal sustainability might have been restored, but government's balance sheet did not improve. A similar story can be told for State Owned Enterprises. Since the Great Recession the fiscal situation worsened markedly – the public debt ratio again approaches 50%. To restore fiscal sustainability this article suggests that the government faces two options: (1) to create room for future countercyclical policy, the government must cut current expenditure and reduce the public debt/GDP ratio to its pre‐crisis level, or (2) substitute much‐needed infrastructure capital expenditure for current expenditure while stabilising the debt/GDP ratio at its post‐crisis level. Given that the much lower fixed capital/GDP ratio inhibits economic growth, the latter option might be more sensible.     

China's Nonfinancial Corporate Debt Dynamics

Since the global financial crisis broke out in 2008, China's nonfinancial corporate debt has been rising steadily and rapidly, posing serious threat to China's financial stability. China's rising corporate debt is mainly attributable to three factors: worsening capital efficiency, worsening corporate profitability and high funding costs. Based on a dynamic recursive model developed in the paper, we simulate the trajectories of China's corporate debt‐to‐GDP ratio, and find that if China fails to reverse the current trends in capital efficiency, corporate profitability and financing costs, China's nonfinancial corporate debt‐to‐GDP ratio will continue to rise without converging to a limit. Against most economists' intuition, given the current trends of changes in parameters, higher economic growth will not help China to escape the corporate debt trap. On the contrary, it will make China's corporate debt problem even worse. To avert a corporate debt crisis, China needs to speed up the structural reform and change the growth paradigm so as to enhance capital efficiency and firms' profitability, while reducing firms' financing costs.     

Knowledge capital,innovation, and growth in China

We study the relationship between industry-level investments in intangible knowledge capital (KC) and three key economic indicators in China. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that investments in KC are productivity-enhancing among domestically owned and foreign invested enterprises (FIEs). Consistent with other research, we find that China's KC generates new patents, but fewer than in major industrialized economies. Finally, we find that China's comparative advantage has shifted toward those sectors where domestic firms have made larger investments in KC, but this trend appears to be independent of the KC accumulated by FIEs.     

Assessing Local Government Debt Risks in China: A Case Study of Local Government Financial Vehicles

Strong credit expansion in China after the recent global financial crisis has brought local government financial vehicles (LGFV) into the spotlight. Rapid growth of LGFV has triggered concern about local government indebtedness, banks' asset quality and, more broadly, China's medium‐term financial stability and sovereign risk. This paper constructs a unique firm‐level dataset to evaluate the country's local government debt. We find an uneven distribution of LGFV, which are concentrated in the coastal areas, and a deterioration of their debt repaying ability from 2010 to 2012. We use principal component analysis (PCA) along with multivariate discriminate analysis (MDA) to identify the credit risk of LGFV based on conventional financial variables as well as local governments' fiscal status. We also estimate the safe boundaries of debt bearing at the provincial government level. The estimations reveal more severe local government debt risks in the middle‐western provinces and higher risks associated with LGFV at the municipal and county levels. Although it is very unlikely that there will be a national debt crisis in China, the high risk of LGFV should be noted and effectively controlled by improving the fiscal transparency of local governments and reforming the fiscal system.     

The External Debt Situation in Indonesia: Performance and Prospects

In interviews with bankers, government economists and academic observers, most of them attributed the absence of an Indonesian debt crisis during 1982–84 to the fact that a significant portion of external public debt, an average of 37 percent, was long-term concessionary loans from foreign governments and international agencies. Our analysis challenges this conventional explanation. We show that if Indonesia (1) had paid the same effective interest rate as Mexico, (2) had the same maturity structure as Mexican debt, and (3) had the same export-GNP ratio as Mexico, then its average 1980–82 total debt service-export ratio would have been 84.4% instead of the actual 30.1%. Our decomposition shows that concessional interest rates account for 5.8 percentage points of the gap, maturity structure for 17.7 percentage points and export orientation for 30.8 percentage points.
We have concluded that the major cause for the favorable 1982–84 outcome is competent management of the exchange rate. The absence of protracted exchange rate overvaluation from 1979 onward was fundamental in maintaining a strong nonoil tradeable sector. The nonoil tradeable sector was able to earn enough foreign exchange to service Indonesian debts when the external shock of high interest rates increased debt service payments and the recession in industrialized countries lowered the price of oil. The absence of extended exchange rate overvaluation also kept the external debt down and the maturity structure on the long side by not encouraging capital flight. We ascribe this use of the exchange rate to protect the tradeable sector as much to the existence of an influential political constituency consisting of neoclassical economists, Javanese peasants and Outer Island residents as to balance-of-payments considerations.
We recommend an aggressive exchange rate policy and two sets of supplementary measures to reduce the probability of a debt crisis in the medium run.     

Managing leverage of infrastructure projects: Aggregate and sectoral risk effect

Funding for infrastructure projects recently shows that debt has a portion more than equity, triggering public debates. Therefore, leverage as an instrument to measure the ability and willingness of project sponsors to fund becomes the utmost importance to discuss. Relating to leverage, risk and government participation are two main factors that can explain the choice of funding decisions by the project sponsors. For this reason, this study would analyze the effect of risk and government participation on leverage through the two main sectors of infrastructure projects, namely the transportation sector and the energy sector, and derivating risk to political risk and financial risk. The objects of research were 976 infrastructure projects listed in the Asian Development Bank during 2007−2016. We use censored regression to examine the model by infrastructure sectors, both as individual and through interaction effects. The analysis showed that overall, leverage of infrastructure projects was rather influenced by financial risk than by political risk. However, the leverage of infrastructure projects in the transportation sector was more vulnerable to risk than that in other sectors.     

Indonesian Foreign Debt: Headed for A Crisis or Financing Sustainable Growth?

This paper examines the build-up in Indonesia's foreign debt between 1981 and 1993, and explores the potential for a debt crisis during Repelita VI. It concludes that Indonesia is not headed toward a crisis in the immediate future- Borrowed funds have generally financed productive investments, contributing to rapid growth in GDP and exports since the late 1980s. If recent trends continue, debt should ease gradually; if not, the economy could withstand a substantial balance of payments shock, at least for a while. A debt servicing problem, although unlikely, is conceivable by the end of the decade. Short-term debt is growing rapidly, non-oil export growth has slowed, and debt service remains high. Appropriate government actions to reduce the potential for a crisis include further deregulation to support growth in non-oil exports, discouraging implicit government guarantees for private sector projects, and reducing government exposure to yen-denominated debt.     

Struggle for survival in credit crunch: The effect of interest rate deregulation in China

This study investigates how interest rate deregulation affects firms' financing choice between bank debt and public debt. Our analysis exploits China's 2013 bank interest rate floor deregulation as an exogenous shock to the supply of bank credit. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that firms with higher default risk substitute away from bank loan and switch to public debt after the 2013 deregulation. However, this substitution to public debt is limited, leading to a dramatic decline in debt ratio. Our result also demonstrates that the effect on firms' public debt financing is more pronounced for firms with better information environments, suggesting that good information environment is an important prerequisite for making the switch. This switching, contradicting to traditional financing framework that high-risk firms prefer bank loans, inevitably is costly. Compared with low-risk firms, bonds issued by high-risk firms have significantly higher spreads, a higher likelihood of being secured, and a higher tendency of including an interest-adjusted clause. More importantly, we also document that high-risk firms subsequently improve their information transparency after the interest rate deregulation. Our findings highlight the role of interest rate deregulation in firms' financing choice and illustrate that firms incur high switching costs when their choice deviates from the optimal financing choice.     

Brazilian public sector disequilibrium

The Brazilian public sector disequilibrium, as measured by growth in the global net public sector debt to GDP ratio, is examined with and without the Plano Cruzado. Two models are used, one based upon a discrete time framework and the other upon a continuous time framework, to trace paths of the debt to GDP ratio for the rest of the decade concentrating on the 1985–1986 period. Two major conclusions are reached. The first, of a theoretical nature, is that discrete time models are inappropriate in an inflationary context as they severely underestimate the inflation tax. This is evidenced by the fact that without the Plano Cruzado and an assumed inflation rate of 350%, the debt to GDP ratio grows from 1985 to 1986 in the discrete time model while it declines for this period in the continuous time model. The second is that the Plano Cruzado may put strong pressure on government finances in the near future due to the drastic fall in the inflation tax. In this case, both models show an acceleration in the growth of the debt to GDP ratio, the more drastic results appearing in the continuous model. This conclusion seems to hold true even if one allows the government to trade debt for monetary base with the consequent increase in money demand due to lower inflation, to roll over its internal debt at a lower average interest rate, or to roll over its foreign debt outstanding at a lower average interest rate.     

What can we learn on Chinese aid allocation motivations from available data? A sectorial analysis of Chinese aid to African countries

Since the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000, Chinese official development assistance (ODA) to Africa has increased drastically. Only few analyses on the determinants of Chinese ODA allocation to African countries are available. Moreover, existing literature mainly focused on total aid flows while Chinese motivations for aid allocation might differ depending on the ODA sector considered. Our objective is to study the factors associated with Chinese aid allocation to African countries by sector between 2000 and 2014. We consider three ODA broad sectors as defined by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): the social infrastructure and services sector, the economic infrastructure and services sector and the production sector. Chinese ODA is measured using AidData's Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset, 2000–2014, Version 1.0. Over the 2000–2014 period, China allocated 971, 218 and 138 ODA projects to African countries in the social infrastructure and services sector, the economic infrastructure and services sector and the production sector respectively. Between 2000 and 2014, the economic infrastructure and services sector was the first sector in terms of ODA amount with a total of US$18.9 billion ahead from the social infrastructure and services sector with US$7 billion or the production sector with US$3.1 billion. Results of our analysis suggest that the motivations of Chinese aid allocation to African countries differ by sector. Chinese ODA in the social infrastructure and services sector appears more responsive to the economic needs of recipient countries but is also more driven by foreign policy considerations. Chinese economic interest, in particular for natural resources acquisition, is associated with China's ODA allocation in the economic infrastructure and services sector. Finally, while governance quality in recipient countries is not related to Chinese ODA in the social infrastructure and services sector, we find that China allocates more ODA in the economic infrastructure and services sector and the production sector to African countries with weaker institutions. One of the strong conclusions of this study is to show that considering only China's overall aid to Africa can be misleading as to its underlying determinants, and therefore to point out the need to disaggregate the analysis by ODA sectors.     

Strategies for fiscal consolidation in Japan

Japan's key fiscal challenge is to put public finances on a more sustainable footing. This paper investigates the macroeconomic implications of alternative fiscal strategies for Japan using the IMF's Global Fiscal Model. The results suggest that (i) an adjustment package that achieves primary balance through lower social transfers and government spending and a higher VAT is the most viable option and has a smaller negative impact on growth than other fiscal measures; (ii) achieving primary balance is not sufficient to stabilize the net debt ratio; (iii) prefunding future aging costs provides greater long-term benefits compared with less front-loaded strategies; (iv) tax reform involving shifting from corporate taxation to consumption taxation could mitigate the short-term output losses associated with fiscal consolidation; (v) the spillovers to the rest of the world from consolidation in Japan are positive in the medium term, but modest.     

Public Sector Growth in the British Cape Colony: Evidence From New Data on Expenditure and Foreign Debt, 1830-1910

The public expenditure shifts that took place following the discovery of diamonds and gold during the second half of the nineteenth century had far-reaching consequences for southern Africa’s development. Using new data for public expenditure and foreign debt in the Cape Colony and evidence from Cape parliamentary budget debates, we trace and explain the growth of the public sector. We find that the coincidence of mineral discovery in 1867 and the granting of responsible government status rapidly accelerated the growth of the public sector. Owing to strong mining interests, railways accounted for more than 70% of the public works expenditure from the 1880s onwards. Spending on human capital and welfare enhancement remained limited. Both the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the mining elites managed to build coalitions that swayed public expenditure decisions towards self-serving ends.     

A fair distribution and transfer mechanism of forest tourism benefits in China

This study establishes a theoretical model of forest tourism benefit allocation. Empirical testing was carried out based on China's inter-provincial panel data from 2000 to 2016, following the principle of fair allocation, and using an iterative algorithm to distribute forest tourism benefits among different economic entities and regions fairly. The empirical results show that urban residents get more than 40% of these benefits, while rural residents get less than half of that of urban residents. After the tax reform, the distribution ratios of the government and enterprises decreased due to an increase in the distribution ratio of urban residents. The transfer of forest tourism benefits among regions is highly unstable, and the central and western regions obtain more benefits than the eastern regions. Therefore, when constructing forest tourism infrastructure, the central and local governments should consider the transfer ratio of these benefits, which will help optimize the structure and use of capital investments, and continue to strengthen the backward-feeding of the economy from the eastern regions to the central and western regions.     

The South African–United States sovereign bond spread and its association with macroeconomic fundamentals

The yield spread of South African to United States 10-year government bonds over the last 5 years has increased substantially to levels approaching those last seen during the mid-1980s. This paper examines the association between the spread and macroeconomic fundamentals over the 1960–2019 sample period, under the GARCH and GARCH-M class of estimators. We find that higher South African economic growth, lower inflation, public and private debt, as well as rand–dollar appreciation are all associated with a statistically significantly lower South African–United States yield spread. The strongest impact is associated with the public debt-to-GDP ratio. Mean spread levels do not appear to be influenced by yield volatility. Finally, while there is no evidence of sign bias in the impact of shocks on yield volatility (negative shock impacts are no different than positive), there is evidence of size bias for both positive and negative shocks: larger shocks have a larger impact on volatility than small, regardless of their sign. Collectively, and even ignoring the impact of private sector leveraging, South Africa’s performance in these macroeconomic fundamentals is associated with an increase in the South African–United States yield spread of 363 basis points (since 2012).     

Cross‐Country Evidence on the Importance of Auditor Choice to Corporate Debt Maturity

We examine the importance of Big Four audits in reducing agency costs evident in corporate debt maturity worldwide. Analyzing a large sample of public firms from 42 countries reveals that the fraction of long‐term debt in firms' capital structures rises with the presence of a Big Four auditor, suggesting that higher‐quality audits substitute for short‐term debt for monitoring purposes. In additional analyses, we find that the role that auditor choice plays in debt maturity is concentrated in firms from countries with strong legal institutions governing property rights and creditor rights. Collectively, our research implies that Big Four audits matter to corporate debt maturity, although the impact is isolated in firms operating in countries with more protective legal regimes.     

Dynamic relationship between China's inward and outward foreign direct investments

This paper studies the dynamic relationship of China's inward and outward foreign direct investments (FDI). It first identifies the key determinants of China's outward FDI (OFDI) in 172 host countries during 2003–2009 using a partial stock adjustment model. It finds strong evidence of dynamic adjustment in China's OFDI stock with an agglomeration effect. The dynamic adjustment and agglomeration effects are stronger in “high-tech” countries than in “low-tech” ones but indifferent in host country's resource endowments and income levels. The empirical results suggest that there exists a substantial adjustment cost in China's OFDI and that China's existing OFDI stock can gradually adjust toward its long-term equilibrium level, which is not only greater but also more volatile than the actual stock. Of particular interest is that we find a strong and positive relationship between lagged inward FDI (IFDI) and contemporaneous OFDI, implying that capital outflow from China has been partially induced by the countries which have invested in China.     

Distortions at the Border; Integration Inland: Assessing the Effect of WTO Accession on China's Agriculture

The main goal of the paper is to address the impact of the WTO on China's agricultural sector. To accomplish this goal we address two sets of issues. First, we seek to provide measures of the distortions in China's agricultural sector at a time prior to the nation's accession to WTO. This is accomplished by estimating the nominal rates of protection (NPRs) of the agricultural sector's major commodities using a new methodology to account for grain quality differences within China and between China and the world market. Second, we seek to assess how well integrated China's markets are in order to understand which areas of the country and which segments of the farming population will likely be isolated from, or affected by, the changes that WTO will bring. We find that NPRs differ among commodities. Some of China's agricultural commodities are well above and others are well below world market prices. We also find that if increased imports or exports affect China's domestic price at the border, its own domestic markets are mostly integrated so that price shifts in one area will affect prices in most of the rest of China. Our analysis finds, however, that a number of policy and structural factors limit the overall size of the shock.