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on China |
| By: | Mahdi Ghodsi (The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, wiiw) |
| Abstract: | In the past few decades, China has put substantial efforts into liberalising its trade and economy that accelerated after its accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001. In this period China has significantly reduced its tariffs on manufacturing imports. However, the proliferation of non-tariff measures (NTMs) imposed by China has made it the country notifying the second largest number of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) to the WTO after the United States. This paper investigates the impact of Chinese TBTs and tariffs on the imports of manufacturing products at the 6-digit level of the Harmonised System (HS) during 2002-2015. Heterogeneity of exporting firms, sample selection bias, multilateral resistances, and endogeneity bias are controlled for according to the recent strands of gravity modelling. Results suggest a positive impact of tariff reduction and the imposition of TBTs by China on its import values and quantities. The impact of Chinese TBTs is also differentiated across exporting countries. Since import prices are not significantly affected by TBTs, the imposed standards and regulations embedded in these trade policy measures allowed the economy to gain access to more products from the more developed economies, leading to trade creation. |
| Keywords: | World Trade Organisation, trade liberalisation, trade policy, technical barriers to trade |
| JEL: | F13 F14 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wii:wpaper:146&r=cna |
| By: | Dupuy, Arnaud (University of Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a model encompassing both Becker's matching model, and Tinbergen-Rosen's hedonic model. We study its properties and provide identification and estimation strategies. Using data on internal migration in China, we estimate the model and compute equilibrium under counter-factual alternatives to decompose the migration surplus. Our findings reveal that about 1/5 of the migration surplus of migrant women is generated in the marriage market and 3/5 in the labor market. We also find that the welfare of urban men married with a migrant wife would have been 10% lower had their migrant wives not entered the urban marriage market. |
| Keywords: | sorting in many local markets, marriage market, hedonic and matching models |
| JEL: | D3 J21 J23 J31 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11329&r=cna |
| By: | Victor Couture; Benjamin Faber; Yizhen Gu; Lizhi Liu |
| Abstract: | The number of people buying and selling products online in China has grown from practically zero in 2000 to more than 400 million by 2015. Most of this growth has occurred in cities. In this context, the Chinese government recently announced the expansion of e-commerce to the countryside as a policy priority with the objective to close the rural-urban economic divide. As part of this agenda, the government entered a partnership with a large Chinese e-commerce firm. The program invests in the necessary logistics to ship products to and sell products from tens of thousands of villages that were largely unconnected to e-commerce trading. The firm also installs an e-commerce terminal at a central village location, where a terminal manager assists households in buying and selling products through the firm's e-commerce platform. This paper combines a new collection of survey and administrative microdata with a randomized control trial (RCT) that we implement across villages in collaboration with the e-commerce firm. We use this empirical setting to provide evidence on the potential of e-commerce integration to foster economic development in the countryside, the underlying channels and the distribution of the gains from e-commerce across households and villages. |
| JEL: | O12 R13 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24384&r=cna |
| By: | Jeannine Bailliu; Xinfen Han; Mark Kruger; Yu-Hsien Liu; Sri Thanabalasingam |
| Abstract: | The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017. We use a supervised machine learning approach by training a support vector machine classification model. The information content and the forecast ability of our LMCI are tested against official labour market activity measures in wage and credit growth estimations. Surprisingly, one of our findings is that the much-maligned official labour market indicators do contain information. However, their information content is not robust and, in many cases, our LMCI can provide forecasts that are significantly superior. Moreover, regional disaggregation of the LMCI illustrates that labour conditions in the export-oriented coastal region are sensitive to export growth, while those in inland regions are not. This suggests that text analytics can, indeed, be used to extract useful labour market information from Chinese newspaper articles. |
| Keywords: | Econometric and statistical methods, International topics, Labour markets |
| JEL: | C38 E24 E27 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bca:bocawp:18-12&r=cna |
| By: | Christophe Muller (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - ECM - Ecole Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales); Huijie Yan (CEARC - Cultures, Environnements, Arctique, Représentations, Climat - UVSQ - Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | The household transition from dirty to clean fuels is important because of its economic, health and environment consequences, locally, nationally and globally. In order to study fuel choices, a non-separated farm household model for fuel demands is developed. Then, discrete choice equations of fuel uses, consistent with this theoretical model, are estimated using microeconomic household panel data from rural China. The estimation results support the theoretical approach that implies that the fuel demands depend not only on income, fuel prices, and demand-side socioeconomic factors, as would occur in the standard fuel demand models in the literature, but also on food prices, agricultural assets, and original household and community characteristics that shape the household responses to market failures. Finally, we present a few policy simulations that reveal the complex substitution impact of energy price policies in China. We provide the first evidence on: price sensitivity of fuel stacking, that food prices exert some pressure on the fuel transition, the role of farm work and activity specialization in fuel choices. Policies should incorporate some of the complexity of the non-separated decisions of rural households in this context of market failures. The complex cross-price effects imply that the policy pricing mechanisms should account for all energy types and food prices. Finally, market-based policies should be coupled with policy interventions aimed at increasing the opportunity cost of dirty fuels. . |
| Keywords: | fuel use,China,consumption demand,energy |
| Date: | 2018–03–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01735847&r=cna |
| By: | Adalmir Marquetti (PUC-RS); Catari Vilela Chaves (PUC-MG); Leonardo Costa Ribeiro (Inmetro); Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque (Cedeplar-UFMG) |
| Abstract: | This paper compares data on rate of profit for the United States and China, exploring a dialogue between investigations on the average and general rates of profit (classical political economy and its modern versions) and inter-industry differences in the rate of profit (industrial economics). The comparative analysis between USA and China (2007-2014) is presented through the trajectories of national average rates of profit, the differences according to firm size, economic and manufacturing sectors. The data show a mismatch between the national average rate of profit (China has higher rates for all years, but 2014) and the rates of profit for manufacturing (USA have higher sectoral rates of profit for all years, but 2009). |
| Keywords: | Rate of profit, different national rates of profit, inter-industry differences in profitability |
| JEL: | P16 O33 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td577&r=cna |