Due to the rapid appreciation of RMB, the consistent declining of the US economy and other uncertain factors, China’s export volume to the United States has declined. The paper first chooses six industries to divide them into three groups based on per capita possession of capital, then employs the monthly data from 2001 to 2008 to carry out EG two-step cointegration test, and finally analyzes the impacts of the US economic growth and the exchange rate variability on different export industries. Empirical results show that the labor-intensive industries are most susceptible to fluctuations brought by economic growth and real exchange rate, while those industries with higher per capita possession of capital are less susceptible to external factors. In the short run, the export of labor-intensive products gives an advantage to China’s foreign trade development, but in the long-run, these industries will be affected greatly by various uncertain factors and the advantages of China’s labor-intensive export industries will disappear with the shift of the international division. Therefore, the only way to guarantee the dominant position of China’s foreign trade is to develop capital and technology intensive export industries and upgrade export structure.

This paper studies the degree of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to import and consumer prices in China with both the ratio of China’s imports to GDP and domestic prices of China’s main trade partners going up. Statistic results show that the degree of ERPT is somehow less than the degree of marginal cost plus mark-up pass-through of exporters, and econometric analyses reach the same conclusion. Besides, the ERPT to import prices is found to be high while the ERPT to CPI is low owing to some factors that obstruct the import prices pass-through channel to domestic CPI. But this situation has been changing significantly since August 2005. Thus, a more flexible exchange rate system is needed for China to absorb the price shock from aboard efficiently.

Motivated by the global debate on the possible revaluation of the Chinese currency, the RMB, in recent years, the objective of this paper is to measure the equilibrium value of the RMB exchange rate through the macroeconomic balance approach in order to produce an assessment of the RMB in terms of periods of misalignment. The empirical evidence indicates that although there turns out to be an increasing degree of the RMB undervaluation in these measures from 2003 to 2004, the RMB is not substantially undervalued in both measures of real effective exchange rates and nominal bilateral exchange rates against the US dollar over the full period 1994–2004.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the change of the exchange rate and the performance of the Chinese stock market after exchange rate regime and split share structure of stock market reformed in 2005, which is important for us to understand the linkages and mechanisms between the two markets deeply. We find that the exchange rate is highly related with the stock market, and there exists long-term cointegration. The results demonstrate that in the long term, the relationship between the two variables mainly belongs to flow-oriented model; Shanghai A Share index is influenced by the exchange rate, yet Shanghai B Share index has shown less indication of long term interrelation with the exchange rate. In the short term, the relationship between the two variables mainly belongs to stock-oriented models, there are inter influence between the stock market and the exchange market. The paper further analyzes the possible influence of different sector indices to exchange rates. Finally, the paper puts forward some advices and policy suggestions.

By introducing the shocks from individual activities into the Hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve (HNKPC), we investigate the inflation dynamics and the effect of excess liquidity in China. According to the estimation result, some soundly conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, the empirical results indicate that the HNKPC is consistent with the nature of inflation dynamics in China, which posits the inflation dynamics as the combination of backward looking adaptive expectations and forward looking rational expectations. Moreover, defining excess liquidity by M2, the elasticity of inflation defined by CPI to excess liquidity is approximately unit, which reveals that the quasi-money is the main force behind inflation. The nature of inflation expectation and the effect of excess liquidity all provide the evidences that tight monetary policy is effective to curbing inflation in China.

In terms of China’s financial intermediation ratio (FIMR) in stock, we make a thorough empirical study on the change of the ratios during 1992–2006. We find that: The monopoly position of bank credit in the financing channel of non-financial sector is weakened, but bank credit is still the most important financing channel for non-financial sector. There is a structure change in the financing channel of government sector and its FIMR is increasing. Though the scale of non-banking financial institutions underwent rapid development during 1992–2006, their role in social financing cannot be evenly matched with banking system. It is the change of various economy behaviors that induce the changes of FIMR in China.

China reformed value-added tax (VAT) by removing investment from the tax base in northeastern provinces in 2004, which is a “natural experiment” of its tax system. Using difference-in-differences method, this paper for the first time investigates the impact of VAT reform on China firms’ fixed asset investment, employment behavior, innovative activities, and productivity, and furthermore discusses the impact of firm behavior on industrial structural upgrade and employment with a firm-level panel data of large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in China. We find that VAT reform significantly promotes firms’ fixed asset investment, and increases firms’ capital-labor ratio and productivity; while enhancement of firms’ productivity is mainly achieved by means of substituting labor with capital, rather than independent technology innovation; meanwhile, VAT reform distinctly decreases employment. Our findings have essential policy implications on the extension of VAT reform in the entire China.

The combination of a high growth rate and low information has been observed since the late 1990s in the Chinese economy. Should the fact be considered as a result of greatly improved supply capability or should the fact reflect the improvement in the government’s aggregate demand management? In this paper, we try to assess the role of aggregate demand and supply shocks in China’s macroeconomic fluctuation. We use a bivariate structural VAR model to investigate macroeconomic dynamics for China within the aggregate-demand and aggregate-supply framework, using the quarterly data in the period of 1996Q1–2005Q4. Our principal findings are following: (1) China’s high growth shall be associated more with greatly improved supply capability, especially after its WTO entrance. The expansionary aggregate demand policies may have limited effects to raise the growth rate in the post-1996 in China. This result suggests that we need a more pro-growth policy stance in order to maintain a high and stable growth. (2) The low inflation in that period is driven primarily by weak aggregate demand rather than supply factors.

This article has constructed a framework to analyze the relationship between national innovation investments, international knowledge spillover due to FDI and regional technological progress. We use the panel data sample in 1992–2006 from China’s 29 provinces (municipalities or autonomous regions) to test the impact of China’s regional R&D investments, international knowledge spillovers of FDI on its regional technological progress. It reveals that the local investments in science and technology are the most important factors to promote technological progress; for the structure and quality of China’s current FDI, the knowledge spillover effects from FDI, especially through the FDI enterprises’ manufacturing activities, are not obvious; the local gains in its technology development from FDI depends on its economic and technological level. Based on the above conclusions we give the corresponding policy recommendations for China’s FDI policy and regional economic development.