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on China |
| By: | Tasso Adamopoulos; Loren Brandt; Jessica Leight; Diego Restuccia |
| Abstract: | We use household-level panel data from China and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture. We find that there are substantial frictions in both the land and capital markets linked to land institutions in rural China that disproportionately constrain the more productive farmers. These frictions reduce aggregate agricultural productivity in China by affecting two key margins: (1) the allocation of resources across farmers (misallocation) and (2) the allocation of workers across sectors, in particular the type of farmers who operate in agriculture (selection). We show that selection can substantially amplify the static misallocation effect of distortionary policies by affecting occupational choices that worsen the distribution of productive units in agriculture. |
| Keywords: | agriculture, misallocation, selection, productivity, China. |
| JEL: | O11 O14 O4 |
| Date: | 2017–01–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-574&r=cna |
| By: | Jeffrey Zax |
| Abstract: | This paper assesses regional inequality in contemporary urban China by predicting earningss for individual workers in multiple provinces, comparing the province of maximum predicted earnings to the province of residence and assessing the predicted gains from relocation. The paper performs the same comparison for the U.S. in 1940 to provide an informal baseline comparison. Workers predicted relatively similar earningss in each of the nine U.S. Census divisions. Fewer than 10% of them predicted maximum earnings in divisions other than their home division that exceeded their predicted home division earnings by more than 20%. In contrast, 45% of Chinese urban workers in 1988 predicted maximum earnings in provinces outside their home province that exceeded their predicted home province earningss by more than 50%. The same was true of 54% of Chinese urban workers in 1995, 74% in 2002 and 57% in 2008. If all Chinese urban workers received the maximum of their predicted earningss across all provinces, rather than their predicted earnings in their home province, average earningss would approximately double, interpersonal inequality would decline by 40-50% and inter-provincial inequality would vanish. In all years, predicted earnings in Guangdong province have generally been greater than in any other province. The implicit value of the right to live in Guangdong was at least 26% of earnings in 1988 and 41% in 1995. It declined to about 7% of earnings in 2002 and 2008, but only because predicted earnings in Beijing and Shanghai had risen. The gaps between predicted earnings in Guangdong and other provinces in those years was similar to those in earlier years. |
| Keywords: | Inequality; Returns to human capital; Migration; Law of one price |
| JEL: | J24 J31 J61 R12 R23 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p693&r=cna |
| By: | Huang, Wei (National Bureau of Economic Research); Zhang, Chuanchuan (Central University of Finance and Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impacts of social pension provision among people of different ages. Utilizing the county-by-county rollout of the New Rural Pension Scheme in rural China, we find that, among the age-eligible people, the scheme provision leads to higher household income (18 percent) and food expenditure (10 percent), lower labor supply (6 percent), and better health (11-14 percent). In addition, among the age-ineligible adults, the pension scheme shifts them from farming to non-farming work, lowers insurance participation rate, but does not change income, expenditure or health significantly. Finally, among the children aged below 15, the pension scheme leads to more pocket money received, more caring from grandparents, improved health, and higher schooling rate. |
| Keywords: | pension, health, elderly |
| JEL: | E21 H55 I38 O22 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10425&r=cna |
| By: | Qu, Zhaopeng (Nanjing University, and IZA Bonn); Zhao, Zhong (School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University) |
| Abstract: | The paper studies the levels and changes in wage inequality among Chinese rural-urban migrants during 2002-2007. Using data from two waves of national household surveys, we find that wage inequality among migrants decreased significantly between 2002 and 2007. Our analysis on the wage distribution further shows that the high-wage migrants experienced slower wage growth than middle-and low-wage migrants - a primary cause of declining inequality of migrants. By using distributional decomposition methods based on quantile regression, we find that the overall between-group effect dominates in the whole wage distribution, which means that the change in returns to the characteristics (education, experience and other employment characteristics) plays a key role, but on the upper tails of the wage distribution, the within-group effect (residual effect) dominates, implying that the unobservable factors or institutional barriers do not favour the migrants at the top tail of the wage distribution. We also study wage differential between migrants and urban natives, and find that though the wage gap is narrowed, the gap at the upper wage distribution is becoming bigger. Overall, the results suggest that there exists a strong "glass ceiling" for migrants in the urban labour market. |
| Keywords: | rural to urban migrants, wage inequality, quantile decomposition, China |
| JEL: | O15 J30 J45 J61 |
| Date: | 2016–12–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:unumer:2016069&r=cna |
| By: | Wenli Cheng; Yongzeng Wu |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether political connections help private firms in China gain access to commercial bank loans. Based on data from the 2012 Nationwide Survey of Private Enterprises in China, it finds that (1) politically connected firms were more likely to have access to commercial bank loans; (2) political connections were more important for smaller private firms and for private firms in industries where state-owned enterprises had a stronger presence; (3) political connection was less important in provinces where private sector development was more advanced; and (4) loan allocation based on political connections did not appear to be inconsistent with commercial principles as politically connected firms were also more profitable. |
| Keywords: | bank lending, private firms, political connection, China |
| JEL: | G21 |
| Date: | 2016–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:2016-07&r=cna |
| By: | Yingxia Pu; Ying Ge |
| Abstract: | With the development of global economy and rapid process of urbanization, migration has become one of the key forces in population redistribution and has important implications for socio-economic development in a region. As we all know, population migration flows between different regions are related to not only the origin- and destination-specific characteristics, but also to the migration flows to and from neighborhoods. Intuitively, changes in the characteristics of a single region will impact both inflows and outflows to and from other regions. In order to explore the spatial interaction mechanism driving the increasing population migration in China since the open door policy, this paper builds the spatial OD model of interprovincial migration flows based on the sixth national population census data and related social-economic data. The findings are as follows: (1) Migration flows show significant autocorrelation effects among origin and destination regions, which means that the migration behavior of migrants in some region is influenced by that of migrants in other places. The positive effects indicate the outflows from an origin or the inflows to a destination tend to cluster in a similar way. Simultaneously, the negative effects suggest the flows from the neighborhood of an origin to the neighborhood of a destination tend to disperse in a dissimilar way. (2) Multilateral effects of the regional economic and social factors through the spatial network system lead to the clustering migration flows across interrelated regions. Distance decay effect plays the most influential force in shaping the patterns of migration flows among all the factors and the negative spillover effect further aggravates the friction of distance. As for destinations, the influence of wage level and migration stocks is beyond the GDP and the positive spillover effects of these factors enhance the attraction of neighborhood regions. The spillover effects of unemployment rate and college enrollment of higher education are significantly negative while destination population is not significant. As for origins, population and migration stocks lead to positive spillover effects on the neighborhoods while the effects of other factors are negative. (3) Changes in the regional characteristics will potentially lead to a series of events to the whole migration system, and the flows to and from the center of oscillation and its neighborhoods vibrate greatly compared with other regions. The simulation results of 5% GDP increase in Jiangsu province indicate that the outflows to other regions decrease while the inflows from all others increase to some different extent. Comparatively, the influence on the flows to and from the regions neighboring Jiangsu is significant while that of remote regions is much less, which cannot be explained by the traditional gravity model. |
| Keywords: | population migration flows; network autocorrelation; multilateral effects; spatial OD model; spatial mechanism analysis; China |
| JEL: | C13 C15 C31 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p423&r=cna |
| By: | Enrica Di Stefano (Bank of Italy); Daniela Marconi (Bank of Italy) |
| Abstract: | Market frictions prevent the efficient allocation of factors of production, slow down structural transformation and lead to costs in terms of lower output and aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use a theoretical framework developed by Aoki (2012) featuring sector-specific frictions on capital and labor à la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007), and compute capital and labor misallocations in China and India using data for 26 sectors over the period 1980-2010. Our findings show that large factor misallocations exist in the two countries. We estimate the potential gains in terms of aggregate TFP stemming from an efficient allocation of factors to range from 25% to 35% in China and from 35% to 40% in India. Finally, we discuss the implications for structural transformation and the relationship between the observed allocation inefficiencies and the evolution of the business environment in the two countries. |
| Keywords: | structural transformation, frictions, resource allocation, productivity, China, India |
| JEL: | E23 O11 O41 O47 O53 O57 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1093_16&r=cna |
| By: | Jean-Francois Maystadt; Giuseppe Migali |
| Abstract: | We study the intergenerational transmission of health using linked registered data from China between 1789 and 1906. We first document the intergenerational correlations across 7 generations. We then identify intergenerational causal associations comparing children born from twin mothers or fathers. In particular, we find a strong and persistent intergenerational elasticity between mothers and children of about 0.52. The intergenerational association from fathers is much weaker and seems to be largely driven by genetic factors. The estimates remain relatively stable up to generation 5 and are robust to different checks. Overall, our results highlight the nurturing role of women in explaining the intergenerational transmission of health, stressing the key role played by women in affecting children's health outcomes in developing countries. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational correlations, causal effects, long-term health outcomes |
| JEL: | I14 I29 I3 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lan:wpaper:147116320&r=cna |
| By: | Jingjing Liu; Peter Nijkamp |
| Abstract: | Along with the globalization and information-economic epoch, international knowledge spillover plays an important role in regional development, and the regional innovation system becomes more and more open-ended. As a nexus of the destination and the outside world, inbound tourism brings various economic and social resources for the development of the host region, which may also contribute to a higher level of cognitive proximity and absorptive capability as well as to greater product variety and manifold consumption externalities. Much research has addressed the influence of innovation on the tourism industry development, but only a few studies have focused on the impact of tourism on innovation. This study focusses on the influence of inbound tourism on a regional innovation system. The aims of this research are to: (1) interpret the mechanism of how inbound tourism impacts regional innovation; (2) inquire the external influence factors of the performance of inbound tourism; (3) explore the different characteristics of these effects when considering different types of innovation; (4) revisit the Tourism-Led Growth (TLG) hypothesis, and consider whether innovation can be a new vehicle to explain the influence of inbound tourism on spatial economic development. The influence of inbound tourism on innovation will provide a new perspective for analyzing the long term impact of tourism development. Furthermore, it may also be a meaningful complement to studies on the relationship between immigration, culture diversity and innovation, especially in the context of developing regions. Our study is organized as follows. First, the theoretical framework and the related hypotheses on the interaction between inbound tourism and regional innovation are presented. The network structure and diverse demands approaches as well as the effect of the regional absorptive capacity are considered and highlighted. Next, data from 30 Chinese Mainland provinces (Tibet being excluded, because part of the important indicators are unavailable) for the years 2003-2012 are used for the empirical analysis. The data come from the Chinese Patent Statistical Yearbook, the Chinese Statistical Yearbook, and the China Economic & Industry Data Database. From a methodical perspective, an entropy method and a perpetual inventory method were undertaken to measure the key variables. Next, a descriptive analysis was used to reach a preliminary idea on the above relationship. As to the existence of spatial autocorrelation, spatial panel data analysis was conducted to test these hypotheses. The study finds that inbound tourism is a driving force for a regional innovation system in China and can bring a new life to regional economic development. Firstly, inbound tourism appears to have a direct and indirect impact on regional innovation, while absorptive capacity has a significant mediating effect in this relationship. Secondly, the impact of inbound tourism on regional innovation capacity tends to be stronger in the wealthier and more international-oriented provinces. Thirdly, the effect of inbound tourism on technological innovation is mostly weaker than that of social innovation. Fourthly, this study supports the TLG hypothesis with regional innovation as the mediating variable. |
| Keywords: | Inbound tourism; regional innovation; absorptive capability; spatial panel data analysis; China. |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p600&r=cna |