ISSN 1673-3444
ISSN 1673-3568(Online)
CN 11-5744/F
邮发代号 80-978
This paper empirically analyzes the factors affecting personal income in urban China using survey data of the “Preference and Life Satisfaction Survey” conducted by the Global COE project of Osaka University from 2009 to 2013. We consider education level as an endogenous variable, and both ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and instrumental variable (IV) regression are performed. We find a number of factors, such as sex, age, education, and marriage that significantly affect personal income. In addition, differences between different occupations are also investigated.
“One Belt and One Road” and Free Trade Zones are two of China’s new opening-up strategies developed in response to the changed domestic and international circumstances. Implementation of these strategies can provide China with a sounder market economic system and a better external environment. It can not only help China to further develop into a high income country, but also facilitate the industrialization and modernization of other developing countries.
Through an examination of the case of the iPhone X, this paper demonstrates that Chinese companies involved in the production of the iPhone X have moved up along the global value chain. According to the bill of materials, those companies contributed 25.4% of the value added of the iPhone X. About 45% of the value added of the iPhone X originated in Japan, South Korea, and other economies. The iPhone trade remains a significant element of the statistical distortion of the China–US bilateral trade imbalance. In terms of gross value, the import of one iPhone X results in a USD332.75 trade deficit for the US; measured in terms of the value added, however the deficit is a mere USD104. The depreciation of the Chinese yuan (CNY) has very limited power to counterbalance the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration because the foreign value added embedded in Chinese exports is 33.9% on average. Simulation results show that to counterbalance a 25% tariff, the CNY would have to depreciate by 43.3% against the US dollar on average, and to fully compensate for a 25% tariff burden on the iPhone X, a 400% depreciation of the CNY would be necessary. Hedging the risk of the punitive U.S. tariffs by depreciating the CNY is impossible.
From the 1970s, the global currency system has two features: the use of one or a few sovereign currencies as the global reserve asset and the floating exchange rate regime between major currencies. This paper points out that the costs of the dollar’s use as an international reserve currency exceed the benefits for both the US and the rest of the world. These costs include the exporting of American manufacturing as a byproduct of its current account deficit needed to supply its currency to the rest of the world. In addition to the detriment to trade from unpredictable exchange rate fluctuations, the termination of the U.S. obligation to redeem its currency for gold also removed an important restraint on deficit financing for the US and many other countries in the short-run, thus promoting excessive leverage that was a major contributor to the 2008 financial crisis. The paper suggests replacing several main countries’ currencies in international reserves with a real Special Drawing Right (SDR) issued according to currency board rules.
The global economic and political order that was created in the aftermath of World War II is under attack by President Donald Trump. In this article, Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz discusses the scope for protectionist actions by President Trump and suggests how countries such as China could and should respond. In particular, he proposes a set of ten principles that should guide China’s response, principles designed to enhance a more stable and efficient multi-polar system of global governance that can contribute to a stronger global economy.
The global COVID-19 pandemic caused various economic contraction in most countries, including all of China’s major trading partners. Using a difference-in-differences model, this study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China’s monthly exports from January 2019 to May 2020. We find strong and robust evidence that China’s exports to countries at high risk from the pandemic experienced a larger decline than exports to low-risk countries after the onset of the pandemic, with the prices of exports increasing significantly. Furthermore, the results of a triple differences model show heterogeneous effects across different industries and goods. Chinese industries located upstream in the global value chain are more vulnerable than those located downstream. Industries with high labor and contract intensity (proxies for processing trade) experienced greater declines than other industries. Exports of goods with high import elasticity of substitution experienced higher prices and moderate volume losses due to the pandemic.
Global imbalances (current account imbalances) have become an important issue for economists and policy makers. Greater exchange rate flexibility is often suggested as a means to achieve faster and more efficient adjustment in the current account. However, previous empirical studies show little support for this hypothesis. This paper revisits this issue with a large panel dataset and a threshold VAR model and finds that (1) some existing popular exchange rate classifications may not capture actual exchange rate variability as well as expected; (2) Once exchange rate variability is correctly identified, the speed of mean reversion in the current account balance is indeed higher in a regime with greater exchange rate variability.
With the rapid urbanization and mass internal migration in China during the past several decades, the population of children who migrate with their parents to the cities has now reached over 35 million. The education of migrant children poses significant challenges to China’s hukou based education system. In this paper, we first review the policy developments and descriptive studies related to migrant children’s education to offer a comprehensive view of the issue. We then provide in-depth examination of several important quantitative literatures, including the effect of parental migration on children’s education, schooling choices of migrant children and their impacts on school performance, peer effects of migrant children in urban public schools. Overall, although considerable progress has been made regarding migrant children’s education in China, more fundamental policy reforms are necessary to improve the quality of migrant children’s education at the compulsory education level and beyond.
This paper presents new estimates of the development of the urban population and the urbanization ratio for the period spanning the Song and late Qing dynasties. Urbanization is viewed, as in much of the economic historical literature on the topic, as an indirect indicator of economic development and structural change. The development of the urban system can therefore tell us a lot about long-term trends in the Chinese economy between 1100 and 1900. During the Song, the level of urbanization was high, also by international standards—the capital cities of the Song were probably the largest cities in the world. This remained so until the late Ming, but during the Qing there was a downward trend in the level of urbanization from 11%–12% to 7% in the late 18th century, a level at which it remained until the early 1900s. In our paper we analyse the role that socio–political and economic causes played in this decline, such as the changing character of the Chinese state, the limited impact of overseas trade on the urban system, and the apparent absence of the dynamic economic effects that were characteristic for the European urban system.
Entering year 2020, the Chinese economy was struck by the COVID-19 outbreak. The unprecedented pandemic, entangled with the already elevated complexities in the nation’s internal environment and external surroundings, aggravated its economic outlook. Internal factors including severe education mismatch in China’s labor force, its vanishing demographic dividend, the declined purchasing power of its middle-income groups, risen leverage ratio of households and enterprises, and soared local government debt reinforced to weaken China’s domestic demand. External factors, especially uncertainty in the China-US relation in the face of the re-shaping global value chain, dragged world economic recovery and thus China’s exports and imports. This summary report highlights some major challenges and opportunities faced by the nation under its new development strategy that stresses internal circulation of domestic economy aided by its interaction with the globe. Our analyses based on IAR-CMM model provide a unified framework for addressing China’s short-, medium-, and long-term issues in an internally coherent manner. Looking into year 2021, our benchmark projection reports an 8.4% annual real GDP growth rate. Alternative scenario analyses and policy simulations are conducted to assess the impacts of potential downside risks and the corresponding policy options for ensuring implicit targets. Through the lens of these analyses, we conclude that a refocus on effective management of internal demand, while deepening structural reforms on supply side and advancing orderly opening up, can help smooth the internal and external circulations of the Chinese economy to achieve high-quality development.
As developed economies have substituted away from manufacturing towards services, so too have developing countries—to an even greater extent. Such sectoral change may be premature for economies that never fully industrialised in the first place. This article presents evidence that countries with smaller manufacturing sectors substitute away from manufacturing to a larger extent, suggesting a trade channel through which falling international relative prices of manufacturing lead price-taking developing economies to substitute accordingly.
This article identifies the differences and common features of two global crises: the Great Depression of 1929 and the international financial crisis of 2008. The circumstances of the two crises differ in terms of the demographic structure, the technological conditions, the economic and social systems in developed countries, the extent of globalization and other global economic situations. Among the common features, both crises were preceded by unprecedented economic booms, laisse-faire regulatory policies, easy monetary and credit policies, asset bubbles and yawning income gaps. Moreover, the crises had a strong redistribution effect, which would cause shifts of power among large countries and major changes in international economic order.
Individuals’ risk attitudes play an important role in economic decision making and policy evaluation, particularly in the midst of unprecedented uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopt a multiple-price-list elicitation method with real money incentives to measure precisely individuals’ risk attitudes at different stake levels and the extent to which they are affected by personal and social shocks following the COVID-19 outbreak in China. We find that subjects who had previously experienced negative personal shocks are more risk-averse at medium and large stakes but more risk loving at very small stakes. For our sample, COVID-19 has no significant impact on risk attitudes, as it is more likely to be regarded as a social shock. The result indicates that the impact of COVID-19 on individual risk attitudes is not as influential as expected, unless the individual’s personal life is affected directly.
This paper addresses the reactions of domestic helpers to the Wuhan (Hubei Province) lockdown that began on January 23, 2020. We use a novel dataset containing the information of over 40,000 Chinese domestic helpers registered on a leading professional website from November 2019 to June 2020. The results indicate a declining pattern of short-term labor supply of domestic helpers across 11 major Chinese cities, which shows an increase in the expected monthly wage of domestic helpers in these cities. More importantly, using a difference-in-difference (DID) model, this paper provides some evidence on the existence of labor market discrimination against domestic helpers born in Hubei Province due to employers’ fear of infection.
We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shock on household consumption in China. Using household survey data, we find that the proportion of liquidity-constrained households increases quickly, but the constraint levels vary across distinct groups. We build a heterogeneous agent life cycle incomplete market model to analyze the long-run and short-run effects of the pandemic shock. The quantitative results reveal a slow recovery of consumption due to three reasons: hiking unemployment rate, declining labor productivity, and worsening income stability. The hiking unemployment rate plays the key role in households’ consumption reduction since it simultaneously leads to a negative income effect and upsurging precautionary saving motives. Our paper highlights the importance of maintaining a stable labor market for faster recovery.
This study investigates the role of job characteristics on an individual’s decisions to follow social distancing policies, work, and apply for unemployment insurance in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data that track millions of mobile devices and their daily movements across physical locations to measure whether the devices’ owners leave their homes, or work part-time or fulltime on a given day, and we also collect data on weekly unemployment insurance claims. We find that the presence of jobs with a high work-from-home capacity in a region increases the ability of people to follow social distancing policies and decreases their unemployment risk, whereas the presence of jobs with high physical proximity decreases the incidences of following social distancing policies and unemployment and increases the incidence of work during the pandemic. These heterogeneous responses based on local job characteristics persist even conditional on a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic variables.
In this article, Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues that the standard macro-economic paradigm has failed not only to predict the crisis but also to provide insights into the design of a regulatory framework that would make a recurrence less likely. He points out that many of the underlying assumptions of the standard paradigm always seemed implausible and many of its predictions, such as those concerning the micro-economic behavior of the constituents (firms and households), are inconsistent with the empirical evidence. He then identifies a number of key modeling challenges, what he views as key ingredients that have to be incorporated in any model that is going to describe economic fluctuations or be the basis of a well-designed regulatory or monetary framework.
In 2020, China proposed a new development paradigm centered on domestic circulation with a "dual circulation" model in which domestic circulation and international circulation promote each other. This new paradigm reflects a clear understanding of China's development trend that saw its share of exports in the GDP declining steadily since 2006. However, the new paradigm does not necessarily mean that China should change its past policy of fully utilizing domestic and international markets and resources in economic development. Because of large economies of scale in modern manufacturing sector, China should continue to make full use of international markets.
Using a newly built soft power index, we examine whether and how soft power affects Chinese firm-level export to the Belt and Road (B&R) countries from 2000 to 2016. We find that soft power has significantly positive effects on both export value and export product types for the B&R countries. These effects are more pronounced than those for non-B&R countries and differ not only between the "Belt" and the "Road" countries but also regional groups, firm ownerships, modes of trade, and sectors. Further analysis shows that soft power increases the intensive margin of exports by approximately three times that of the extensive margin. Thus, our findings provide a new perspective for understanding both the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the contemporary economic evolution occurring in China.
In this paper, following Blanchard and Fischer (1989), I investigate how the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic—the increase in the probability of death—may affect growth and welfare in a scale-invariant R&D-based Schumpeterian model. Without money, the increase in the probability of death has no effect on long-run growth and a negative effect on welfare. By contrast, when money is introduced via the cash-in-advance (CIA) constraint on consumption, the increase in the probability of death decreases long-run growth and welfare under elastic labor supply. Calibration shows that the quantitative effect of an increase in the probability of death on welfare is much larger compared to that on growth.
In the light of the fact that there has been substantial growth in China’s exports in last three decades, particularly after China joined the WTO in 2001, this article investigates the major sources of China’s export performance during 2002–2014 by using the constant market share (CMS) model. In this study, exports are further decomposed in three categories based on their technological intensity using Lall (2000) classification on 3 digit SITC Revision-3 data provided by UN Comtrade via WITS database. The categories are high technology, medium technology and low technology. It is found that growth of China’s exports has, moreover, remained above world exports growth in all three categories during the period of study. The analysis reveals that export performance is mainly attributed to its competitive strength in the global market, though decreasing trend has been observed in the competitiveness of all three categories. Increasing cost of labor and appreciating RMB could be the causes behind decreasing competitiveness of Chinese exports. Product structure effect, on an average, has turned out to be negative in all the categories which is the most disturbing aspect of China’s export performance. On the other hand, geographical structure effect has positive impact on export performance of high-technology based exports whereas it has negative impact on export performance of low-technology and medium-technology based exports. China being the world’s largest exporter, decreasing competitiveness and wrong product structure effect could adversely influence its export performance in particular and its growth in general.
Health insurance lowers the medical financial burden of the insured through a risk-sharing mechanism, and more importantly, reduces the motivation for precautionary saving. This paper explores the relationship between health insurance coverage and household financial portfolios. We choose 2002 urban China as a case study when the health insurance system had a problem of limited adverse selection. Using data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project Survey, we find that health insurance coverage influences households’ preference for financial assets, especially for the risky financial assets. These effects become more pronounced as the coverage rate of health insurance in the family increases. Our results are consistent with precautionary saving theory which suggests that future expenditure risk could affect household asset portfolios. Therefore, development of social security or a health insurance system could effectively promote the development of financial markets, especially riskier aspects of financial markets.
The recent China’s growth slowdown is both cyclical and secular, driven by external and internal factors. In this article, I highlight several key internal factors that have hindered China’s growth in recent years. These include worsening misallocation of resources and declining growth of total factor productivity, plus rising household income inequality and debt overhang in the face of tightened liquidity constraint. All of these show the urgency for deepening reforms in China’s key macroeconomic landscapes in order to remove institutional barriers and distortions deep-rooted in the nation’s economic and financial structure, and to correct fundamental imperfections of its social- economic system. I argue that such reforms are of critical importance for China’s pursuit of healthy and sustainable growth and of balanced and adequate development going forward.
This paper discusses the benefits of investment in skills in China. We highlight the achievements China has made over time in human capital investments and the new challenges that have emerged as the country develops. To fuel China’s further economic growth and social developments, it is essential to take a more holistic view on skill investments. We suggest policies that promote both economic efficiency and social mobility.
This short essay surveys recent literature on the competitive saving motive and its broader economic implications. The competitive saving motive is defined as saving to improve one’s status relative to other competitors for dating and marriage partners. Here are some of the key results of the recent literature: (i) cross-country evidence show that greater gender imbalances tend to correspond with higher savings rates; (ii) household-level evidence suggest that: (a) families with unmarried sons in rural regions with more skewed sex ratios tend to have higher savings rates, while savings rates of families with unmarried daughters appear uncorrelated with gender imbalances; and (b) savings rates of families in cities tend to rise with the local sex ratio; (iii) rising sex ratios contribute nearly half of the rise in housing prices in the People’s Republic of China; and (iv) families with sons in regions of greater sex ratios are more likely to become entrepreneurs and take risky jobs to earn more income.
We use disaggregated data by country and industry to empirically analyze the host country determinants of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (FDI) for the years 2003 to 2011. Our results suggest that the host-country determinants of Chinese FDI differ between high- and low-income countries. While all Chinese FDI is invariably market seeking, other motivations stand out for differing sectors in specific country groups. The resource seeking motivation is relevant for manufacturing FDI to high-income countries with relatively high fuel abundance, and to low-income countries with primary resource abundance (other than fuels). Differently, the strategic-asset seeking motivation, measured by the level of R&D spending on GDP, only positively and significantly affects Chinese manufacturing and service FDI to OECD countries, while higher education levels are an attraction factor for all investing firms. Natural resource is an important attraction factor for Chinese FDI, not only in resource-related sectors, but also in manufacturing and service sectors. Finally, Chinese FDI tends to follow exports (rather than foster them), especially in service sectors.
This paper provides the first empirical study on bond defaults in the Chinese market. It overcomes the deficiencies of existing methods, which suffer from lack of actual default data for back testing. With newly available bond default data, we analyze the roles of market variables against accounting variables under various models. While we find that Merton’s market-based structural model and KMV’s Distance to Default exhibit languid discriminating power compared with hazard models that have carefully constructed predictors, other market variables carry significant information about bond defaults and could help improve on models with only the accounting variables. This implies that the collective intelligence of the market could somehow mitigate the distortion caused by misreported accounting information. Further, model performance can be significantly improved by adding predicting variables that link an individual financial measure to the broader market performance, such as the relative margin—a business environment proxy introduced in this study. We not only shed light on the default behavior of the Chinese bond market, but also provide a promising approach to improve the variable selection process.
This paper analyzes the impact of health insurance on household portfolio choice. Using the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finance and Health Retirement Survey databases, it finds that insured households are more likely to own stocks and invest a larger proportion of financial assets in stocks than uninsured households do. The results remain strong even after controlling for household characteristics and reverse causality. Further, the results are robust across different survey years and data sources. It suggests that a precautionary motive is strong in household portfolio choice decisions.
China’s economic growth has been declining continuously at a rapid rate since 2011. It dropped to 6.7% in 2016 by more than 3% from nearly 10% average growth rate during 1979–2010. As for its causes, there are different interpretations among Chinese economists. One of the interpretations, which is held by some scholars including Justin Yifu Lin, is that external and cyclical factors are the main causes for the decline. The author disagrees with this viewpoint and holds that the root cause of economic deceleration is the delay in deep institutional reforms. An inclusive economy and state coercive capacity are two essential ingredients for sustaining economic prosperity. China must further enhance economic inclusiveness, and accelerate its transition into an efficiency-driven and innovation-driven economy through deepened comprehensive marketization reforms. Meanwhile, it should further strengthen the rule of law to build a limited government that is capable, accountable, effective and caring.
China’s growth decelerated substantially after 2010. This paper argues that the main cause for the deceleration is external and cyclical, China has a potential growth rate of 8%, the economy has good investment opportunities and resources, and China is likely to achieve a medium-high growth rate of around 6.5% in the coming years. The paper also examines the various structural reforms that can help China to release its growth potential and complete the transition to a well-functioning market economy.