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on Transition Economics |
| By: | Huang,Zhangkai; Liu,Jinyu; Ma,Guangrong; Xu,L. Colin |
| Abstract: | The serious implications of privatizing state-owned enterprises for politicians, managers, and investors make such decisions highly contingent on firm characteristics and past performance, complicating the identification of the privatization effects. A unique opportunity for this identification arises from a rule of promotion of local politicians based on age requirements in China. This paper finds that Chinese cities whose top officials were older than age 58 were 20 percent less likely to privatize local state-owned enterprises during the wave of state-owned enterprise restructuring starting in the late 1990s. Relying on the regression discontinuity design, the analysis finds that privatizations led to productivity gains of more than 170 percent, an order of magnitude larger than the traditional estimates based on the firm fixed effect specification (including its random-growth variant). The paper further finds that the privatization effects are significantly larger when the government is less involved in the affairs of local firms. The findings underscore the need to deal with the time-varying selectivity of privatizations and highlight the crucial role that state-owned enterprise privatizations played in China's economic takeoff. |
| Date: | 2020–05–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9261&r=all |
| By: | Tao Xiong; Wendong Zhang (Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD)); Chen-Ti Chen |
| Abstract: | China is the world's largest pork producer and a leading pork importer. Since August 2018, ongoing outbreaks of African Swine Fever (ASF), a highly contagious and deadly disease affecting pigs, have hit China's livestock industries and wiped out 40% of China's pigs. We leverage data on daily stock returns from 25 major publicly listed firms from China and eight major pork-exporting countries to provide the first systematic analysis of the firm-level economic impacts of the outbreaks. We find that on average announcements of ASF outbreaks have led to positive and significant stock returns for both Chinese and international hog companies. Notably, Chinese hog companies on average enjoyed 10%-40% of cumulative abnormal returns during the 2019 Chinese Spring Festival, a peak demand season for pork. We show that larger hog firms tend to capture greater positive stock returns. Our results suggest opportunities for consolidation, expansion, and upgrades of China's meat industry that have long-run implications for its global competitiveness and efficiency. |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ias:cpaper:20-wp602&r=all |
| By: | Kseniya Abanokova (National Research University, Russia); Hai-Anh H. Dang (World BankTemplate-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0); Michael M. Lokshin (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | Hardly any literature exists on the relationship between equivalence scales and poverty dynamics for transitional countries. We offer a new study on the impacts of equivalence scale adjustments on poverty dynamics in the Russian Federation, using equivalence scales constructed from subjective wealth and more than 20 waves of household panel survey data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The analysis suggests that the equivalence scale elasticity is sensitive to household demographic composition. The adjustments for the equivalence of scales result in lower estimates of poverty lines. We decompose poverty into chronic and transient components and find that chronic poverty is positively related to the adult scale parameter. However, chronic poverty is less sensitive to the child scale factor compared with the adult scale factor. Interestingly, the direction of income mobility might change depending on the specific scale parameters that are employed. The results are robust to different measures of chronic poverty, income expectations, reference groups, functional forms, and various other specifications. |
| Keywords: | poverty; poverty dynamics; equivalence scale; Russia; panel survey. |
| JEL: | I30 J10 O15 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2020-539&r=all |
| By: | Marcel Lincényi (Alexander Dubček University of Trenčín); Jaroslav Čársky (Alexander Dubček University of Trenčín) |
| Abstract: | The research study offers an analysis of public opinion of citizens of the Slovak Republic focused on trust in politics and politicians, while the authors try to look for possibilities of increasing the political participation of Slovaks. Among other things, the analysis of public opinion showed that citizens of the Slovak Republic are not active in political participation. Most of the polled Slovaks do not try to influence politics other than by participating in elections, with only a third of those polled actively participating in the elections. Demanded citizens are not satisfied with the current state of the political scene in Slovakia, as well as with the current investigation of political cases. Research has also shown that Slovaks would be willing to participate in elections on a regular basis in cases where ordinary people care about politicians or if politicians are honest and reliable people who deliver on promises, (such as no-policy politics. |
| Keywords: | Slovak Republic,politics,public opinion,political culture,active participation,trust |
| Date: | 2020–03–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02569346&r=all |
| By: | Shahbaz, Muhammad; Shafiullah, Muhammad; Khalid, Usman; Song, Malin |
| Abstract: | Energy resources are an important material foundation for the survival and development of human society, and the relationship between energy and economy is interactive and complementary. This paper analyzes the energy consumption–economic growth nexus in Chinese provinces using novel and recent nonparametric time-series as well as panel data empirical approaches. The dataset covers 30 provinces over the period of 1980-2018. The empirical analysis indicates the presence of a nonlinear functional form and smooth structural changes in most of the provinces. The nonparametric empirical analysis validates the presence of a nonlinear unit root problem in energy consumption and economic growth, and nonlinear cointegration between the variables. Additionally, the nonparametric panel cointegration test reports evidence of convergence in energy consumption and economic growth patterns across the provinces. The nonparametric regression analysis finds economic growth to have a positive effect, on average, on energy consumption in all provinces, except for Beijing. Further, the energy environmental Kuznets curve exists between economic growth and energy consumption in 20 out of 30 Chinese provinces. The Granger causality analysis reveals the presence of a mixed causal relationship between economic growth and energy consumption. The empirical findings have important implications for Chinese authorities in planning for improving energy efficiency, decoupling between economic growth and energy consumption, and reducing the environmental footprint of provinces. |
| Keywords: | Energy Consumption, Economic Growth, China, Nonparametric Analysis |
| JEL: | Q4 |
| Date: | 2020–05–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:100769&r=all |
| By: | Shenzhe Jiang (Peking University); Jianjun Miao (Boston University); Yuzhe Zhang (Texas A&M University) |
| Abstract: | China’s housing prices have been growing rapidly over the past few decades, despite low growth in rents. We study the impact of housing bubbles on China’s economy, based on the understanding that local governments use land-sale revenue to fuel infrastructure investment. We calibrate our model to the Chinese data over the period 2003-2013 and find that our calibrated model can match the declining capital return and GDP growth, the average housing price growth, and the rising infrastructure to GDP ratio in the data. We conduct two counterfactual experiments to estimate the impact of a bubble collapse and a property tax. |
| Keywords: | Housing Bubble, Infrastructure, Economic Growth, Chinese Economy, Property Tax |
| JEL: | O11 O16 O18 P24 R21 R31 |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bos:wpaper:wp2020-005&r=all |
| By: | Ding, L.; Jones, A.M.; Nie, P. |
| Abstract: | We present a comprehensive analysis of ex ante inequality of opportunity (IOp) in health among Chinese adults aged 60+ and decompose the contributions of different sets of circumstances. Data are drawn from the 2011 and 2015 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) linked with the 2014 CHARLS Life History Survey. We use a range of blood-based biomarkers, and apply a re-centered influence function (RIF) approach and a Shapley-Shorrocks decomposition to partition the contribution of circumstances across different quantiles of the biomarker distributions. We find that IOp accounts for between 3.75% and 29.57% of total health inequality in old age across the range of biomarkers. Shapley-Shorrocks decompositions show that spatial circumstances such as urban/rural residence and province of residence are the dominant determinants of IOp for most of the biomarkers. Distributional decompositions further reveal that the relative contributions to IOp in health of household socioeconomic status and health and nutrition conditions in childhood increase towards the right tails of the distribution for most of the biomarkers, where the clinical risk is focused. |
| Keywords: | biomarkers; CHARLS; China; inequality of opportunity; Shapley-Shorrocks decomposition; unconditional quantile regressions; |
| JEL: | D63 I12 I14 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:yor:hectdg:20/10&r=all |
| By: | Yang, Jue; Chen, Fei |
| Abstract: | This study examines the impacts of psychological factors on Chinese consumers’preferences of PEV features as well as PEV uptake intension in cities with and without license number plate restrictions. Psychological factors are relatively less investigated factors in the domestic literature, but consumers may not behave rational as researchers expected when facing such a complex choice problem. This study generates three latent psychological factors, namely knowledge of policy and PEVs, social influence, and environmental ttitudes/innovativeness, and integrates them with object-case best-worst scaling model through a hybrid choice model. Evidences show that knowledge and environmental attitudes are weaker compare to social influence and innovativeness, but these factors affect consumers’ preferences differently both at individual level and city level. To facilitate market-oriented PEV uptake, especially in areas without restrictions, improve reputation through interpersonal communication on technical features are expected. While in large cities with restrictions, through neighborhood effects and innovativeness, emphasizing air pollution and CO2 emission reduction features could be more efficient. |
| Keywords: | Plug-in Electric Vehicle, China, social influence, willingness to pay |
| JEL: | Q5 |
| Date: | 2020–05–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:96165&r=all |
| By: | Tong, Bing; Yang, Guang |
| Abstract: | This paper proves in a New Keynesian model that interest rate pegging can explain the unusual business cycle fluctuations in China. It is traditional wisdom that when the nominal interest rate is inflexible, there is no unique equilibrium in macroeconomic models. We prove that a unique equilibrium exists if the nominal rate is pegged for a limited period, after which it switches to a flexible rate regime. The peg alters the propagation of external shocks, magnifies volatility of endogenous variables, and leads to instability of the economy. Besides, the model becomes more unstable when the peg duration extends, and when the pegged rate deviates from steady state. At the same time, fiscal multiplier increases under the peg, indicating fiscal policy may be more effective in mitigating economic fluctuations when monetary policy is restricted by interest rate pegging. |
| Keywords: | New Keynesian model; Chinese economy; Interest rate peg; Fiscal policy; Rational expectation |
| JEL: | E31 E32 E43 E62 |
| Date: | 2020–05–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:100930&r=all |
| By: | Markus K. Brunnermeier; Michael Sockin; Wei Xiong |
| Abstract: | China's economic model involves active government intervention in financial markets. We develop a theoretical framework in which interventions prevent a market breakdown and a volatility explosion caused by the reluctance of short-term investors to trade against noise traders. In the presence of information frictions, the government can alter market dynamics since the noise in its intervention program becomes an additional factor driving asset prices. More importantly, this may divert investor attention away from fundamentals and totally toward government interventions (as a result of complementarity in investors' information acquisition). A trade-off arises: government's objective to reduce asset price volatility may worsen, rather than improve, information efficiency of asset prices. |
| JEL: | G01 G14 G28 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27171&r=all |
| By: | Alexander Subbotin (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Samin Aref (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | We study international mobility in academia with a focus on migration of researchers to and from Russia. Using millions of Scopus publications from 1996 to 2019, we analyze detailed records of more than half a million researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address at some point in their careers. Migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses. We compute net migration rates based on incoming and outgoing flows of researchers which indicate that while Russia has been a donor country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in more recent years, it has experienced relatively balanced flows and a symmetric circulation of researchers. Using subject categories of publications, we obtain a profile of possibly mixed disciplines for each researcher. This allows us to quantify the impact of migration on each field of science. For a country assumed to be losing scientists, our analysis shows that while Russia has suffered a net loss in most disciplines and more so in pharmacology, agriculture, environmental science, and energy, it is actually on the winning side of a brain circulation system for dentistry, psychology, and chemistry. For the discipline of nursing, there is a balanced circulation of researchers to and from Russia. Our substantive results reveal new aspects of international mobility in academia and its impact on a national science system which could inform policy development. Methodologically, our new approach can be adopted as a framework of analysis for studying scholarly migration in other countries. |
| Keywords: | Russian Federation, bibliographies, brain drain, circular migration, computational demography, computational social science, digital demography, information sciences, international migration, labor migration, libraries, library science |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2020-025&r=all |
| By: | Zichu, Jin; Masih, Mansur |
| Abstract: | Infrastructure has experienced a rapid development in China over the past decade. The economic contribution of infrastructure investment has been widely examined in the literature using various data and models. However, the results are inconclusive. This paper using Nonlinear ARDL tests the effect of infrastructure investment on both GDP and domestic private credit level. The paper finds that an increase in infrastructure investment will increase GDP but push the domestic credit level higher. The contribution of this paper is that a stable investment in infrastructure is needed, while the efficiency of the management is also important. Government should take care of the debt level and reduce the debt leverage, as more debt will eventually drag the economy down. |
| Keywords: | Infrastructure, GDP, domestic credit, NARDL, China |
| JEL: | C22 C58 E51 H41 |
| Date: | 2018–12–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:100595&r=all |
| By: | Ran, Aobo; LIU, LI |
| Abstract: | Science and technology (S&T) policies play the important role in China’s S&T development proven by China’s progress. As the context varies, the policies changes as well. It is valuable to analyze what changes and what remains during the policy change. This paper introduces policy style and adjusts institutional grammar firstly provided by Ostrom as the method, discourse institutionalism to analyse and compare two most important policies of China’s S&T reform in 1985 and 2015 to reveal the change of policy style. We find that 1) China’s S&T policies always are economic-oriented from 1980s ; 2) higher-level leadership gets involved into the S&T policy recently and top-level design dominates over local practice; 3) governmental intervention becomes more indirectly and companies become more active and have more autonomy in decision-making. Furthermore, we illustrate two cases of hybrid rice, high speed railway, as the empirical studies, to testify our findings of policy change and to show how policy styles actually work in different eras. |
| Date: | 2020–05–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:a46xg&r=all |
| By: | SONG, ShiLiang |
| Abstract: | At present, the epidemic situation of COVID-19 is raging rampantly in the whole world, affecting the hearts of billions of people. In less than half a year, COVID-19 swept the world, seriously threatening the safety of all mankind. At the beginning, the epidemic was most serious in China. Under the strong command of the highest level of the Chinese government, the whole Chinese people United as one, and achieved initial results in the struggle against covid-19 with scientific prevention and control. Summarizing China's experience and lessons in combating the epidemic is undoubtedly very beneficial to the people of the world in jointly combating the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic. The most important experience is: strong organizational leadership, enhanced cooperation with the WHO, the establishment of a national anti-epidemic headquarters, responsible for the command and control of human, financial and material resources throughout the country, and local officials at all levels in the front line of the epidemic. Heart to heart with the people, breathe together and share a common destiny. Prevention is the first, prevention and treatment are combined. The treatment emphasizes the combination of Chinese and Western medicine. The “Four Anti and Two Balances” advocated by Academician Li Lanjuan’s team, and the “Three Drugs and Three Formulas” recommended by Chinese medicine experts of the National and Health Commission, played a key role in improving the success rate of treatment. Establish fever clinics and establish square cabin hospital to eliminate infections in hospitals, emphasizing the protection of medical staff and avoiding cross-infection. Control the source of infection, try to achieve "four early", early detection, early isolation, early diagnosis and early treatment. "Four concentration", focus on patients, experts, resources and treatment. Take all measures to cut off the spread. Take all measures to protect susceptible people. Wearing masks, washing hands frequently, hot bathing, individual serving, home office, going out to maintain a social distance of more than one meter, eating nutritious foods rich in protein and vitamins, strengthening physical exercise and improving physical fitness are all effective ways to prevent COVID-19. |
| Date: | 2020–06–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:gfnep&r=all |
| By: | Myeongwan Kim |
| Abstract: | The explosive growth in Chinese imports to Canada over the last two decades has had both negative and positive effects. In this paper, we look at the impact of Chinese imports on the prices Canadians pay for household consumption goods. We find Canadians have benefited from lower prices on some goods and lower inflation overall. To quantify the importance of Chinese imports for individual consumer products and map them to consumer price data, we construct concordance between products in the consumer price index (CPI) and commodities in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System. We estimate that over the 2001-2011 period, cumulative inflation would have been 1.17-percentage-points higher for the total CPI had there been no change in the Chinese share of total imports in Canada. This assumes other factors are held constant. The average annual inflation for the total CPI was 2.1 per cent over the 2001-2011 period, implying that annual inflation would have been about 0.12-percentage-points higher if there had not been a surge in imports from China. |
| Keywords: | China Shock, Canada, Imports, Productivity, Innovation |
| JEL: | F62 O32 O51 O53 L60 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sls:resrep:1908&r=all |
| By: | Janda Karel; Binyi Zhang |
| Abstract: | Understanding the influencing factors of carbon dioxide emissions is an essential prerequisite for pol- icy makers to maintain sustainable low-carbon economic growth. Based on the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), we investigate the relationships among economic growth, carbon emission, financial development, renewable energy consumption and technology innovation for China for the period 1965-2018. Our empirical results confirm the presence of a long run relationship among the underlying variables. Our long run estimates show that financial development has negatively significant impacts on carbon emissions, whereas renewable energy and technology innovation have limited impacts on carbon mitigations. In addition, the short run Granger causality analysis reveals that renewable energy consumption has a bidirectional Granger causality with carbon emissions and technology innovations. In the short run, we find that financial development can positively effect China’s carbon mitigation indirectly, via the channels of renewable energy sources and technology innovations. Our results have a number of public policy implications for Chinese policy makers to maintain sustainable low carbon economic development: (i) establish a green finance market to mobilize the social capital into green industry; (ii) continue the environmental law enforcement to control for carbon emissions among energy-intensive industries; (iii) provide government fiscal incentives to promote renewable energy sources on both supply and demand sides of the market. |
| Keywords: | Financial development, Carbon emissions, ARDL, China |
| JEL: | K32 O13 P28 |
| Date: | 2020–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:prg:jnlwps:v:2:y:2020:id:2.003&r=all |
| By: | Maciej Albinowski; Piotr Lewandowski |
| Abstract: | Since 2008, Poland has been among the EU countries that have increased their minimum wage levels the most, following period in the mid-2000s during which the country’s minimum wage was barely raised. We evaluate the impact of these minimum wage hikes on employment and wage growth in Poland between 2004 and 2018. We estimate panel data models utilising the considerable variation in wage levels, and in minimum wage bites, across 73 Polish NUTS 3 regions. We find that minimum wage hikes had a significant positive effect on wage growth and a significant negative effect on employment growth only in regions of Poland that were in the first tercile of the regional wage distribution in 2007. These effects were moderate in size, and appear to be more relevant for wages. Specifically, we show that if the ratio of minimum wage to average wage had remained constant after 2007, by 2018, the average wages in these regions would have been 3.4% lower, while employment would have been 1.2% higher. On the other hand, in the remaining two-thirds of Polish regions, we find no significant effects of minimum wage hikes on average wages or on employment. We also find indicative evidence that the effects on employment growth differ between groups of workers: i.e., that they are negative for men and for workers in industry, but they are positive for women and for workers in services. |
| Keywords: | minimum wage, spatial heterogeneity, panel data |
| JEL: | J21 J23 J38 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ibt:wpaper:wp042020&r=all |
| By: | Alex Proshin (PSE - Paris School of Economics, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement) |
| Abstract: | This study evaluates the impact of introducing Maternity Capital (MC) program child subsidy of 250,000 Rub (7,150 euros or 10,000 USD, in 2007) for giving birth to /adopting 2nd and subsequent children since January 2007. The reform made it possible for eligible Russian families to allocate these funds to improve family housing conditions, to sponsor children education, or to invest them in mother's retirement fund. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of the MC claim eligibility on various child outcomes and household-level consumption patterns. Using data from representative Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey 2011-2017, I test regression discontinuity models and find no significant difference in health, educational and well-being outcomes between children raised in MC claim eligible and ineligible families. In addition, no such differences were found in terms of household-level dietary habits and preferences. The results are robust to different and functional, semi- and non-parametric RDD specifications. |
| Keywords: | child subsidy,child outcomes,Maternity Capital,regression discontinuity |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-02652268&r=all |