|
on China |
| By: | Ngai, L. Rachel; Pissarides, Christopher; Wang, Jin |
| Abstract: | China's hukou system imposes two main barriers to population movements. Agricultural workers get land to cultivate but are unable to trade it in a frictionless market. Social transfers (education, health, etc.) are conditional on holding a local hukou. We show that the land policy leads to over-employment in agriculture and it is the more important barrier to industrialization. Effective land tenure guarantees and a perfect competitive rental market would correct this inefficiency. The local restrictions on social transfers favour rural enterprises over urban employment with a relatively smaller impact on industrialization. |
| Keywords: | Chinese immigration; Chinese land policy; imperfect rental market; mobility barriers; hukou registration; social transfers |
| JEL: | J61 O18 R23 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:87619&r=cna |
| By: | Badi H. Baltagi; Peter H. Egger; Michaela Kesina |
| Abstract: | Whether a firm is able to attract foreign capital and whether it may participate at the export market depends on whether the fixed costs associated with doing so are at least covered by the incremental operating profits. This paper provides evidence that success for some firms in attracting foreign investors and in exporting appears to reduce the associated fixed costs with exporting or foreign ownership in other firms. Using data on 8,959 firms located in Shanghai, we find that contagion and spillovers in exporting and in foreign ownership decisions within an area of 10 miles in the city of Shanghai amplify fixed-cost reductions for both exporting as well as foreign ownership of neighboring firms. Contagion among exporters and among foreign-owned firms, respectively, amplify shocks to the profitability of these activities to a large extent. These findings are established through the estimation of a spatial bivariate probit model. |
| Keywords: | firm-level exports, firm-level foreign ownership, contagion, spatial econometrics, Chinese firms |
| JEL: | C11 C31 C35 F14 F23 L22 R10 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6993&r=cna |
| By: | Chen, Yi; Huang, Yingfei |
| Abstract: | China introduced its world-famous One-Child Policy in 1979. However, its fertility appears to have declined even faster in the early 1970s than it did after 1979. In this study, we highlight the importance of the Family Planning Leading Group in understanding the fertility decline since the early 1970s. In 1970, provinces gradually established an institution named the Family Planning Leading Group to facilitate the restoration of family planning, which had previously been interrupted by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. An important feature of this policy change is that the process differed by province. We find provinces that formed the leading group earlier also experienced an earlier decline in the fertility rate. Exploiting this provincial variation in establishment year, we estimate a difference-in-difference model that can explain about half of the decline in China's total fertility rate from 5.7 in 1969 to 2.7 in 1978. In comparison to the 1979 One-Child Policy, which previous research has widely treated as an exogenous shock to the fertility rate, our empirical strategy has three features: it captures a greater decline in the fertility rate, does not result in a contemporaneous increase in the sex ratio, and is robust to the inclusion of province-specific trends. |
| Keywords: | Family Planning,Fertility Rate,Sex Ratio |
| JEL: | J13 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:204&r=cna |
| By: | Michael Funke; Rongrong Sun; Linxu Zhu |
| Abstract: | Household borrowing in China has increased considerably in recent years, raising concerns about the household sector’s vulnerability and implications for the stability of the financial system. We construct a number of granular debt-burden indicators at the level of individual Chinese households and calculate the share of households that are financially vulnerable using the three available waves (2011, 2013 and 2015) of China’s Household Finance Survey. Overall loan-to-value (LTV) ratios appear safe and sound at first glance, but closer scrutiny reveals that Chinese households in the lowest income quintile face high vulnerability and struggle to meet their debt commitments. Our stress tests suggest that Chinese households in higher quintiles, despite the huge increase in household indebtedness, are not particularly vulnerable to declining incomes or falling house prices |
| Keywords: | Household debt, household financial vulnerability, financial stability |
| JEL: | D10 D14 G21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fds:dpaper:201803&r=cna |
| By: | William Barnett (Department of Economics, The University of Kansas; Center for Financial Stability, New York City; IC2 Institute, University of Texas at Austin); Mingzhi Hu (Department of Investment, School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics,Shanghai, China;); Xue Wang (Department of Finance; College of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China;) |
| Abstract: | Impacts on the probability of transition to entrepreneurship in rural China associated with the utilization of information communication technology (ICT) are estimated using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey. We identify cell phone ownership and internet use as proxy variables for ICT utilization and find that cell phone ownership and internet use have positive impacts on entrepreneurship. After controlling for observables and time and regional fixed effects, cell phone users (internet users) are 2.0 (6.4) percentage points more likely to engage in entrepreneurship than the others. Considering that the average entrepreneurship rate for rural households is only 9.5% in the sample, the influence of cell phone ownership and internet use are very strong in the economic sense. Our results are robust to unobservable individual characteristics, model misspecification, and reverse causality of entrepreneurship to ICT utilization. Evidence also suggests that social network and information and knowledge acquisition play the mediating roles in the impact of ICT utilization on entrepreneurship. |
| Keywords: | ICT; social network; information acquisition; entrepreneurship |
| JEL: | D10 M51 Q55 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kan:wpaper:201802&r=cna |
| By: | JaeBin Ahn (International Monetary Fund); Hyoungmin Han (The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva); Yi Huang (The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how Korea’s import and export linkages with China affect the innovation outcomes of Korean manufacturing firms. Using our automated algorithm, we match Korean patent data to KIS-Value firm data from 1996 to 2015. We find that rising import and export with China lead to more patent applications by Korean manufacturing firms, with the positive impact particularly driven by large or public firms compared to SMEs or private firms. Most importantly, all of these results hold only in those sectors with higher quality products than Chinese products, shedding lights on reconciling recent empirical studies that found conflicting evidence on ’Schumpeterian force’ and ’escaping competition.’ |
| Keywords: | Competition, Innovation, China Shock, Schumpeterian Force, Escaping Competition |
| JEL: | F14 F16 O34 |
| Date: | 2018–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp07-2018&r=cna |
| By: | Gandenberger, Carsten |
| Abstract: | China's photovoltaics sector provides an interesting case to examine, if and how the country is aiming at innovation leadership after having established itself as the global manufacturing leader. Due to the dominance of Chinese companies in the global PV market, their innovation and production decisions have become crucially important for the global transition towards renewable energy. Another aspect of PV technology is that technological progress has driven the develop-ment of various types of PV cells, which can be categorised in three different technology generations. The functional analysis of the technological innovation system for PV in China conducted in this paper shows, that the government has indeed strengthened indigenous innovation efforts, which has resulted in a rapid rise of academic publications and to a lesser extent of patents for PV technology. A disaggregated analysis of transnational PV patents demonstrates that techno-logical catching-up of China picked up speed in the period between 2008 and 2010 and takes place in all three technology generations. However. technological catch-up has been most successful in the third generation of PV cells, which is still at an experimental stage and predominantly conducted at public research entities. Overall, China's PV sector seems to be still quite far from attaining global innovation leadership, which is mainly due to the relatively low engagement of the corporate sector. However, as the first generation of PV currently dominates the world market and is technologically mature, this will probably not threaten industrial leadership in the short to medium term. |
| Keywords: | Economic Catch-Up,Photovoltaics,Technological Innovation System,China |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:fisisi:s032018&r=cna |