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on China |
| By: | Wang, Xiaonan; Wang, Yan |
| Abstract: | Political leaders in China regularly launch anti-corruption campaigns to win public support. But how are anti-corruption signals perceived? We use event study to examine the case of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign – an unprecedented effort in China to fight corruption. Contrary to expectations, we find that for the firms with connected officials later investigated, the initial anti-corruption signals – speeches from the top leadership and earlier crackdowns on other senior officials – did not decrease their stock prices. We argue that the perceived high costs of following through and repeated campaigns in the past paradoxically nurtured cynicism. We exploit the case of Zhou Yongkang and Ling Jihua – the two officials who were alleged to be involved in the power struggle and whose downfall had circulated widely since 2012. We find that when the targets of earlier crackdowns were connected to Zhou or Ling, the stock prices of the firms went down only if their connected and later investigated officials were in the same faction; the stock prices of the other firms, however, went up. We interpret the results as investors’ misperceptions of the campaign in the beginning. Our findings suggest that even real efforts in campaign-style enforcement can be dismissed. |
| Keywords: | anti-corruption campaign; campaign-style enforcement; event study; stock market |
| JEL: | F3 G3 |
| Date: | 2022–12–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124863 |
| By: | Lin, Chun |
| Abstract: | Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. 358 pp. |
| Keywords: | Wiley deal |
| JEL: | N0 F3 G3 J1 |
| Date: | 2023–03–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124879 |
| By: | Callahan, William A. |
| Abstract: | While many use rational IR theory to explain Chinese foreign policy behavior, this paper follows global IR to employ interpretivist theory to examine how Chinese elites understand their country's role in the world. In particular, it explores the Chinese global order ideas of socialism, tradition, and nation through a comparative analysis of how they work in China-Russia relations, especially after China's 20th Communist Party Congress in 2022. The first section presents a critical analysis of the realist understanding of the China-Russia-U.S. strategic triangle. It argues that the socialist concept of "united front work"better explains Chinese (and Russian) policy in terms of short-term "tactical triangles."To probe China's long-term global order ideas, the second section explores narratives of tradition to examine the concentric circles model of global order seen in Chinese tianxia and Russian Eurasianism. To understand these competing Russocentric and Sinocentric global orders, the third section explores how each country's official historiography highlights narratives of the nation and especially how national rejuvenation requires correcting the "national humiliation"of lost territories. Rather than see these narratives in a linear chronological history - i.e., from tradition to socialism to nationalism - this paper considers how they overlap in socialism, tradition, and nation, a non-linear dynamic triad of global order ideas. It concludes first that further research is necessary to examine the interrelation of these three narratives: while nation and tradition are often employed to support the overarching narrative of socialism in recent years, this could certainly change. The conclusion then argues that while these narratives may be coherent theoretically, they have not been very successful in achieving Beijing and Moscow's foreign policy objectives. |
| Keywords: | China; interpretivism; global order; socialism; foreign affairs; Russia |
| JEL: | B14 B24 P2 P3 |
| Date: | 2023–06–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124884 |
| By: | Olivier Marie (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Thomas Post (Maastricht University); Zihan Ye (Zhejiang University of Technology); Xiaopeng Zou (Zhejiang University) |
| Abstract: | The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the 1980s, has declined over the past two decades. In 2018, the Communist Party promoted a “one head†policy, replacing the dual governance of village chief and party secretary with a single office-holder. We examine the short-term impacts of this policy on voting behavior and political perceptions using a nationally representative survey and election timing as an instrument. Our findings reveal a significant decrease in election turnout in “one head†villages due to reduced competition. However, villagers’ perceptions improve: they report less corruption and greater confidence in local government. This suggests that recentralization was achieved at the cost of electoral involvement but without negative backlash on institutional quality perceptions. |
| Keywords: | Recentralization, dual office-holding, election turnout, political perceptions, rural China |
| JEL: | D72 D73 H77 P3 R28 |
| Date: | 2024–06–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20240040 |
| By: | Sirui Li; Philip Verwimp |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of the reform of China’s unified college entrance examination on the admission opportunities of better-performing students. In 2010, China started to transform the province-designed National College Entrance Examinations into a unified system. In the new system, besides the admission vacancies conventionally fixed in each province, colleges can refer to an across-province comparison of students’ grades to allocate a small number of bonus admission vacancies among the in-reform provinces. Ideally, this may incentivize students from a province to make extra efforts to compete with students from other provinces, and reward a better-performing province with more bonus admission vacancies. We reveal a fact that colleges avoided allocating bonus admission vacancies, but propose that students would always take the across-province comparison as true and make extra but useless efforts. Drawing on a sample including the observations of 13 provinces in two subjects from 2010 to 2020, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis to evaluate the effect of the examination reform on the proportion of high-grade students in an in-reform province. We also use triple difference estimators to evaluate how the treatment effect is contingent on the number of fixed admission vacancies in a province. We find that students in the provinces with fewer fixed admission vacancies would make more extra efforts to perform well in an across-province comparison, while students in the provinces with more fixed admission vacancies had less incentive to compete for bonus admission vacancies that were trivial to them. This implies that the examination reform reinforced rather than decreased the inequality rooted in colleges’ non-transparent fixed admission vacancy allocations. |
| Keywords: | standardized testing; college admission; centralized examination; preferential admission; student performance; educational inequality |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/377794 |
| By: | Henderson, J. Vernon; Su, Dongling; Zhang, Qinghua; Zheng, Siqi |
| Abstract: | Over the last forty years, China has experienced extraordinary growth under output market reforms, but the growth rates are now tapering off. Reforms in factor markets and city governance have been much slower and are viewed as having the potential to yield considerable efficiency gains. In this paper, we explore this possibility, tackling the key issues of local political manipulation of land markets and objectives of local leaders, constraints on the local budgetary process to finance infrastructure and capital market favoritism of certain cities. We use a structural general equilibrium model with trade and migration frictions, based on prefecture level data. We model the political process of land misallocation within cities which drives up housing prices and estimate city-by-city local leaders’ preferences over economic performance versus residents’ welfare. Counterfactual analysis shows that equalizing capital prices across cities, changing the political scorecard for city leaders to reward just maximization of local consumer welfare, and relaxing local budget constraints together increase welfare of consumers and returns to capital by 13.7% and 2.25% respectively. Housing prices would decline in almost all cities; and the reforms would reduce the current excessive, often showcase investment in local public infrastructure by 49% nationally. These reforms would significantly reduce the population of favored cities with low capital costs like Tianjin and Beijing and raise the population of cities with high costs of capital and low local-leader weights on consumer welfare like Shenzhen and Dongguan. |
| JEL: | R14 J01 F3 G3 |
| Date: | 2022–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124874 |
| By: | Jiayi Wen; Xiaoqing Yu |
| Abstract: | Does public insurance reduce uninsured long-term care (LTC) risks in developing countries, where informal insurance predominates? This paper exploits the rollout of LTC insurance in China around 2016 to examine the impact of public LTC insurance on healthy workers' labor supply, a critical self-insurance channel. We find that workers eligible for public LTC insurance were less likely to engage in labor work and worked fewer weeks annually following the policy change, suggesting a mitigation of uninsured risks. However, these impacts were insignificant among those with strong informal insurance coverage. Parallel changes in anticipated formal care use corroborate these findings. While our results reveal that public LTC insurance provides limited additional risk-sharing when informal insurance predominates, they also underscore its growing importance. |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2408.14243 |
| By: | Beckmann, Joscha; Czudaj, Robert L.; Murach, Michael |
| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to analyze the macroeconomic effects of media coverage related to the trade conflict between China and the U.S. for selected countries of the European Union. Our main aim is to evaluate whether media coverage constitutes a relevant transmission channel for macroeconomic effects. We evaluate the response of survey-based macroeconomic expectations, stock prices, and realized industrial production. Our analysis focuses on Germany, France, Italy, and Spain in order to allow for heterogeneous effects across major EU countries. We find significant effects on expectations, stock prices, and industrial production. Especially, a significantly negative effect on current account expectations is observed for three of the four considered EU countries (Germany, Italy, and Spain). |
| Keywords: | China, Current account, EU, Expectations, Trade war |
| JEL: | F32 F41 F43 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:121751 |
| By: | King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center) |
| Abstract: | Developing clean hydrogen industries and markets are strategically crucial for Saudi Arabia and China to achieve their net-zero climate goals. Saudi Arabia has made significant progress in hydrogen development from extraction to commercialization. Different options for galvanizing clean hydrogen production are being explored, with the goal of reaching four million tons of clean hydrogen annually by 2030, most of which will be exported to major energy consumers in East Asia and Europe. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of hydrogen. The construction of an integrated hydrogen industry by 2035 will promote the use of hydrogen across the transportation, energy storage, and industrial sectors. |
| Keywords: | Belt and Road, Capital expenditure, Circular Carbon Economy (CCE), CO2 emissions |
| Date: | 2024–02–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:prc:wbrief:ks--2024-wb01 |
| By: | Taiyo Yoshimi; Uraku Yoshimoto; Takatoshi Ito; Kiyotaka Sato; Junko Shimizu; Yushi Yoshida |
| Abstract: | This study utilizes the granular Japanese customs data from 2014 to 2020 to examine the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to Japanese import prices. It mainly focuses on the impact of the invoicing currency choice on ERPT. The ERPT elasticity in products invoiced in the exporter’s currency is greater than those invoiced in yen. In the full sample analysis, the ERPT elasticity was 0.75 for products invoiced in the exporter’s currency, compared to about 0.19 for yen-invoiced products. We find the same tendency for imports from two Asian powerhouses: China and Thailand. There is no significant difference in the ERPT elasticity between products invoiced in the exporter’s currency and those invoiced in a third currency (i.e., a currency other than yen or the exporter’s currency). In addition, an asymmetric pass-through is found, namely the ERPT during the appreciation phase of the yen is higher than during the depreciation phase. This finding is interpreted that foreign exporters strengthen their pricing-to-market behavior during the yen depreciation phase to maintain their market share. |
| JEL: | F1 F31 F33 F39 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32910 |
| By: | Te Bao; John Duffy; Nobuyuki Hanaki |
| Abstract: | In the digital age, privacy in economic activities is increasingly threatened. In considering policies to address this threat, it is useful to consider what value, if any, people attach to privacy in their economic activities. This valuation may be influenced by a mixture of concerns including the desire for personal autonomy, concerns about the exposure of confidential information, and the risk of reputational damage due to dishonest or stigmatized behavior. Our focus is primarily on reputational concerns as we assess individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid scrutiny of their potentially dishonest behavior in a simple coin flipping task. We gather and analyze data from Japan, China, and the U.S.A. to determine if there are notable differences across these nations in WTP. Our findings reveal that people’s WTP to “avoid the spotlight” is positive and economically sizable across all three countries and is the largest in Japan. |
| Date: | 2024–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dpr:wpaper:1238r |