Economic spillover effects in the Bohai Rim Region of China: Is the economic growth of coastal counties beneficial for the whole area?

This study uses panel data on the Bohai Rim Region of China to test for spatial autocorrelation, and measures economic spatial spillover effects with the space Durbin econometric model. We discuss whether the economic development of coastal counties benefits the whole area. To do this, we focus on the “distance from the coast” factor, which is influenced by transportation time. The results indicate the presence of significant spatial autocorrelation in the Bohai Rim Region. Further, economic spatial spillover effects exist in this region. “Distance from the coast” exerts a significantly negative impact on the local GDP per capita but a significantly positive impact on the GDP per capita of other districts. This means that the economic development of coastal counties does not benefit the whole region. “Value of exports” exerts a significantly positive influence on the local economy and no significant influence on other counties, while “foreign direct investment” exerts a significantly positive influence on the local economy and a significantly negative influence on other counties. “Number of employees in units” exerts a significantly positive influence on the local economy and a significantly negative influence on the other counties. The factors “primary industry's share in GDP” and “tertiary industry's share in GDP” influence the local economy positively, but the former exerts no significant influence on other counties and the latter exerts a negative influence on other counties. “Rate of fixed asset investment” influences the local economy negatively and has no significant effect on other counties. “Total retail sales of social consumer goods” has no significant influence on the local economy but a positive significant influence on the others. Finally, marine resource utilization and marine output can affect economic growth positively. On this basis, we propose policy suggestions for harmonious economic development in this region.     

Economic growth in Asia: Determinants and prospects

Using a growth accounting framework, we find that developing Asia grew rapidly over the past three decades mainly due to robust growth in capital accumulation. The contributions of education and total factor productivity in the region's past economic growth remain relatively limited. We also make long-run growth projections for developing Asia by combining the growth accounting framework with growth regression approach. Our baseline projections based on the model of conditional convergence show that the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of the 12 developing Asian economies covered by this paper will be consistently lower for the next two decades than their historical performance. However, policy reforms in education, property rights, and research and development can substantially raise GDP growth in the region and partly offset the slowdown in growth caused by the convergence phenomenon. Even under the baseline scenario, the region's share in the world economy will increase from the current 34 percent in 2009 to close to a half in 2030.     

Economic Convergence in the African Continent: Closing the Gap

The paper attempts to analyse the conditional β‐convergence and its sources for 32 African countries over the period 1960‐2008. The augmented Solow model with both gross domestic product (GDP) per worker and per capita income is estimated using the dynamic system generalized methods of moments (GMM) technique with the panel data. This is the first study on the sources of conditional β‐convergence for African countries. According to the results of the augmented Solow model, income convergence rates are lower than those of GDP per worker. Moreover, total factor productivity convergence, human capital convergence and capital labour convergence are contributing towards the convergence of GDP per worker in Africa. This means that growth in the poorest African countries is being augmented by “catch‐up factor,” which is good news for them. However, convergence in terms of GDP per worker is not being fully translated into income per capita convergence. The demographic structure in the African continent with its record of persistent population growth has played an important role in lowering the income convergence of its countries.     

Falling behind and catching up: India's transition from a colonial economy

India fell behind during colonial rule. The absolute and relative decline of Indian GDP per capita with respect to Britain began before colonization and coincided with the rise of the textile trade with Europe. However, the fortunes of the traditional textile industry cannot explain the decline in the eighteenth century and stagnation in the nineteenth century as India integrated into the global economy of the British Empire. Inadequate investment in agriculture and consequent decline in yield per acre stalled economic growth. Modern industries emerged and grew relatively fast. The reversal began after independence. Policies of industrialization and a green revolution in agriculture increased productivity in agriculture and industry. However, India's growth in the closing decades of the twentieth century has been led by services. A concentration of human capital in the service sector has origins in colonial policy. Expenditure on education prioritized higher education, creating an advantage for the service sector. At the same time, the slow expansion of primary education lowered the accumulation of human capital and put India at a disadvantage in comparison with the fast‐growing economies of East Asia.     

Classification of Growth Clubs and Convergence： Evidence from Panel Data in China, 1981-2004

This paper uses provincial panel data to examine club convergence in China during 1981–2004. We estimate the province‐specific initial technology level, A(0), and classify the Chinese economy into “developed club” and “underdeveloped club” based on the economic characteristics of A(0), instead of on geographical location. We find significant evidence of conditional convergence across provinces, and that the convergence speed in the developed club is faster than that in the underdeveloped club. We also find that: (i) human capital accumulation contributes more than physical capital does to club convergence; (ii) there is a positive correlation between infrastructure and growth convergence at the national level and within the developed club, while the spillover effect of infrastructure has not been developed in the developing club; and (iii) the effect of economic openness on convergence is tiny, and insignificant across and within clubs.     

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1885–2008: Evidence from eight countries

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been absent from recent debates about comparative long-run growth owing to the lack of data on aggregate economic performance before 1950. This paper provides estimates of GDP per capita on an annual basis for eight Anglophone African economies for the period since 1885, raising new questions about previous characterizations of the region's economic performance. The new data show that many of these economies had levels of per capita income which were above subsistence by the early twentieth century, on a par with the largest economies in Asia until the 1980s. However, overall improvements in GDP per capita were limited by episodes of negative growth or “shrinking”, the scale and scope of which can be measured through annual data.     

Income shares and capital formation: patterns of recent developments

The development of the functional income distribution in the advanced capitalist economies of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. has shown a marked shift towards the profit share during the 1980s. Starting from this observation the impact of changing income shares on capital formation is studied in a post-keynesian framework. Following a model proposed by Bhaduri/Marglin, different patterns of income distribution and capital accumulation are distinguished theoretically and are examined empirically for the manufacturing sectors of the investigated economies. It is concluded that the development of the profit share and the rate of capital accumulation on average over the business cycle implies that the conditions for co-operative “wage-led growth” have been established again during the cycle covering the 1980s, although these opportunities for co-operation have not been realized by supply-side politics.     

南北经济收敛性与共同富裕

区域经济收敛有利于协调区域发展,从而有助于实现我国共同富裕的奋斗目标。然而我国幅员辽阔,区域经济差距由来已久。当下,从GDP总量的角度来看,我国区域经济格局呈南北经济差距扩大的态势。文章利用我国284个地级市文章中的284个地级市还包括4个直辖市。2000—2019年面板数据,探析了南北经济差距演变情况。首先,基于σ收敛和dagum基尼系数分析了人均实际GDP演变特征;其次,构建β收敛模型分析了南北经济收敛性,并考察了人力资本、物质资本、技术水平、对外开放和财政支出对南北经济收敛的影响;最后,文章从共同富裕的视角,对我国西南、西北和东北地区与其他地区的经济收敛性进行探讨。研究发现:(1)南北区域经济存在显著的俱乐部效应,南方内部经济由收敛演变为不具有显著收敛特征,而北方内部经济差距均呈收敛趋势;(2)适度的人力资本的流动不会导致经济发散,物质资本总体上延缓区域经济收敛速度,财政支出对区域经济收敛的作用有限,而技术水平和对外开放对经济收敛速度的影响不稳定;(3)从实现共同富裕的总体目标来看,西北地区的经济表现与其他地区存在显著差异,东北和西南的小部分区域也需要引起一定的重视。对此文章提出合理化建议,以期更好实现共同富裕目标。     

Does Schooling Promote Economic Growth?

Abstract: This paper revisits the debate on schooling and economic growth with particular reference to the case of sub‐Saharan Africa. Following the endogenous growth model developed by Lucas (1988) that considers human capital as one factor of production and schooling as a means of human capital accumulation, two results of schooling are explicitly stated: accumulation of privately owned and publicly owned human capital. By developing a growth estimating equation containing these two types of schooling results from the model and confronting it with empirical data, the hypothesis that schooling has got growth effect is tested. The analytic result suggests that in the indicated economies, for the period covered by the study (1966–2000), schooling that leads to accumulation of publicly owned human capital is associated with per capita income growth. Likewise, the analysis provides supporting evidence for the argument that primary schooling level is more associated with growth than other levels of schooling.     

Measures of human capital and the mechanics of economic growth

We examine the mechanism by which human capital affects economic growth and convergence, using provincial level panel data from China. We specify alternative measures of human capital and apply them to an enhanced growth model, which we estimate parametrically, nonparametrically, and with a threshold model. Our results show that economic convergence is pronouncedly conditional on human capital across all measures. The positive “benefit of being backward” due to lower initial income is almost trumped by the negative impact of low levels of human capital in the poorest areas.     

Economic Systems and Economic Growth

In a planned economy, state monopoly ensures that economies of scale are exploited. However, state monopoly could not commit to reward its workers. Anticipating this, individuals will exert less effort. In a market economy, competition among firms ensures that higher effort from workers will be rewarded. However, competition means that economies of scale are not fully exploited. Per capita output growth is generated by continuous adoption of new technologies substituting labor for capital. Growth rate in a market economy is higher than that in a planned economy when the incentive to exert effort is relatively more important.     

The Later You Pay,the Higher the k

This paper shows the importance of the age path (life-cycle timing) of any tax for the accumulation of capital in the economy. Income, consumption, and wage taxes differ in their age paths as well as their incentive effects. This paper studies how the differing age path of each tax affects the capital accumulation of the economy in an empirically calibrated life-cycle model. We investigate lump-sum “age” taxes and find in every case that the later the person pays tax, the higher the k of the economy. To analyze the life-cycle timing effect of conventional transactions-based taxes (income, consumption, and wage), we replace each tax with a lump-sum age tax that has the identical age path of tax payments over the life cycle. We find that the timing effect is quantitatively important and often causes the impact of a tax on capital accumulation to be very different from what would be predicted from the incentive effect.     

国民总财富的估算与结构分析——以安徽省为例

国民总财富把经济发展、社会进步和资源环境变化结合起来,更好地代表了经济主体可持续发展的程度。文章依据世界银行提出的方法估算出了1990-2011年安徽省人均财富以及总财富的各项构成部分,结果表明:现阶段安徽省仍然大量使用自然资本来推动人均GDP和人均财富的增长。且现阶段,安徽省财富的积累还是以自然资本为主,但是自然资本的比例越来越低,生产资本所占财富的比重正缓慢上升。人力资本比重最小,这不利于经济的可持续发展。     

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.     

Relevant international experience of real exchange rate adjustment for China

Is the real appreciation of the Chinese yuan essential for correcting global imbalances? The present study offers a new perspective to the debate by drawing upon the rich international experience embodied in World Bank's World Development Indicators database. We find that the price levels of China and the United States are both low relative to the world's average. Therefore, the discrepancy between the price levels of China and the United States has been, in fact, close to zero since 2002. The difference in per capita income can fully account for the price difference between China and the United States. However, the Balassa–Samuelson effect is not a reliable guide for projecting the trend of real appreciation. According to the experience of those economies that have experienced real currency appreciation against the US dollar in 1985–2005, the mode of faster wage growth and inflation is as common as nominal appreciation, far more common for economies with a low initial price level. We do not find empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that low price levels tend to cause external surpluses. But real appreciation has a powerful effect in boosting job creation in the service sector. Therefore, the real appreciation of the Chinese yuan would contribute to restructuring the Chinese economy towards a domestic demand-based growth track.     

Regional convergence under declining population: The case of Japan

Using regional data from Japan, we examine how population growth affected regional convergence in Japan, where population decline has become conspicuous in several regions. The basic equation in the analysis allows two distinct features that previous studies rarely explored. First, we allow the coefficient of initial per capita output to change when the growth rate of population is lower than a threshold value. Second, we allow the growth rate of population to have ambiguous effects on the growth rate of per capita output. Our estimation results confirm the convergence hypothesis in Japan. However, we find that the declining speed of convergence was more conspicuous in the regions that had negative population growth. We also find that the decline in population growth, which was irrelevant for regional economic growth before 1995, came to have harmful impacts on regional economic growth after 1995. We believe this occurred because in societies with declining populations, economies of agglomeration had more significantly disappeared in poorer regions than in richer regions.     

The Stock Market,Monetary Policy,and Economic Development

In this article, we examine the impact of financial market development on the level of economic development. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where individuals face idiosyncratic risk. Incomplete information also provides a transaction role for money so that monetary policy can be studied. While an active banking sector promotes risk sharing, we incorporate a market for equity by allowing individuals to trade capital across generations. In this manner, each asset and financial market in our model fulfills a distinct economic function. Consistent with recent empirical work, we find that the impact of access to a stock market may be indeterminate—the economy may respond with significant gains in capital accumulation and risk sharing, or there may be relatively little impact. We also show that the effects of monetary policy vary across the level of financial development. In economies with small stock markets, increasing the amount of liquidity will cause capital accumulation to decline. By comparison, in advanced economies, capital accumulation improves.     

Growth convergence reconsidered

Growth Rate Convergence Reconsidered. —While convergence properties lie at the heart of the endogenous-exogenous growth debate, the empirical literature on convergence to date remains ambiguous. Results appear to be particularly sensitive to the choice of income per capita or labor productivity as dependent variable. The paper shows that the dependence reflects a measurement error arising from the interdependence of human capital accumulation, labor force participation rates and development levels. Estimation of a corrected convergence equation yields results generally supporting convergence except in the manufacturing sector.     

Economic growth in the Mid-Atlantic region: Conjectural estimates for 1720 to 1800

We construct decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the Mid-Atlantic region between 1720 and 1800. They show that the region likely achieved modest improvements in per capita GDP over this period despite a number of demographic factors that tended to slow the pace of growth. Nonetheless the rate of growth we find is below that commonly assumed to have prevailed in eighteenth century North America and calls those estimates into question. The striking feature of the region's economy in the eighteenth century was not the rising living-standard, but its ability to achieve rapid extensive growth without a decline in living standards. To contemporaries this extensive growth and short-term volatility in incomes must have been much more visible than any trend improvement in overall well-being.     

Women of an uncertain age: quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century†

Geary and Stark find that Ireland's post‐Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long‐run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population's basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen‐Li find that gender‐specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self‐reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark's interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe's club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital.