China Economic Quarterly International最新文献

In this paper, we examine the impact of housing rent increase on migrants' household consumption and social integration. Using the China Migrants Dynamic Survey 2011–2014, we find that rent increase significantly reduces migrants’ non-housing consumption and leads to deteriorating social integration. Heterogeneous analyses find that rent increase has a larger impact on male migrants, older people with high school degrees or above, and those who work in the service industry. Additionally, rent increase exacerbates residential segregation between migrants and local residents. Our study provides implications for how policies can help migrants adapt to urban life.

This article studies the effects of Chinese aid on economic development in Africa. We geographically match Chinese aid in Africa to the satellite nightlight and other variables. Using a grid-cell panel dataset, we find that Chinese aid, particularly infrastructure projects, has significant and robust positive impacts on the economic development in Africa. Mechanism analysis suggests that Chinese aid substantially reduces violent rebel activities and growth in population and industries. The heterogeneous analysis demonstrates that Chinese infrastructure projects foster development not via resource exploitation.

By analyzing high-frequency data of mobile platform transactions in a large Chinese city, this paper explores the effects of digital coupons on catering and retailing businesses. The results show that digital coupons could generate positive and sustainable effects on the turnover and total sales of local catering and retailing businesses. These positive effects are found for catering and retailing businesses of all sizes, especially large merchants. In addition, while digital coupons are effective in boosting the consumption of commodities such as food and cell phones, they do not crowd out spending on other categories.

Using panel data from National Rural Fixed Point Survey and a supplementary survey about rural ICT projects, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of ICTs on rural households’ income and income disparity in China. The results show that ICTs promotes the growth of total income and wage income of rural households, and has an inhibitory effect on agricultural income, but this inhibitory effect gradually disappears in the process of rural ICT development. The positive effect of ICTs on rural households’ total income is enduring. The heterogeneous analysis further indicates that the income-increasing effect of ICTs is more pronounced for higher-income and higher-educated farmers, which exacerbates the income disparity in rural areas.

The housing provident fund is an important part of payroll taxes. This paper quantifies its impact on employment. Although the fund helps enterprises with R&D to recruit more employees, it will also reduce the profitability of enterprises and cause enterprises to shrink their production scale, resulting in a negative overall effect on the number of employees. The negative impacts are significant in groups with strong financing constraints, and it mainly affects workers with a low education level and male workers. This paper also examines the impact of the increase and decrease of the contribution rate. The results show that reducing the contribution rate will promote employment.

We use the prefecture-level panel data and enterprise-level data of China's manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2009 to investigate the effects of economic development and minimum wage policy on foreign-invested enterprises' exit behavior. The increase of local minimum wage from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile accounts for 20% of the average exit rate of foreign-invested manufacturing enterprises, while the local economic development does not affect the exit of foreign-invested manufacturing enterprises. Compared with “market-oriented” foreign-invested enterprises, “cost-saving-oriented” foreign-invested enterprises are more likely to exit from the market owing to the rise of minimum wage. Enterprises in industries with high labor intensity, large scales, low average wages, relatively high proportions of low-skilled labor, fierce competition, and poor industrial supporting facilities are more likely to be negatively affected by the rise of minimum wages.

This paper investigates how the government stabilizes economic growth from the perspective of government expenditure. We contribute a method to identify the government expenditure aimed at stabilizing growth and empirically examine it using a dataset of economic growth targets. We find that when the economy encounters adverse shocks, government expenditure increases significantly by 1.1 percentage points on average for every one percentage point increase in the growth target. We document the following patterns of stabilizing growth: (1) government increases expenditure on economic affairs rather than on other functions; (2) government expenditure is financed by current revenue; and (3) it is a temporary behavior to stabilize growth. This paper also suggests that stabilizing growth by increasing government expenditure is a global phenomenon.

Recent years have witnessed the rising support for right-wing populism in European politics. We rely on the outcomes of the 2014 European Parliament elections to empirically examine the economic and cultural mechanisms that fuel this trend. Using import competition to measure economic shocks and regional-level refugee shocks, we find that regions exposed to more intense trade shocks are more likely to vote for right-wing parties. We further show the increasing support for economically far-right parties is mainly caused by trade shocks, and the electoral support for culturally far-right parties stems mainly from refugee shocks.

R&D manipulation prevails in firms' application for high-tech enterprise certification. This paper provides evidence on how media coverage significantly inhibits firms' R&D manipulation behaviour by increasing citizens' concerns. Among all the media reports, original reports and in-depth reports serve the strongest purpose in alleviating R&D manipulation. Among all types of media, online media and authoritative media play a stronger role. We also find a more pronounced supervision role of media for enterprises that are owned by private entities, covered by more analysts, administrated by more capable governments or located in regions with a higher marketization level. We also provide evidence on the enhancement of firms’ R&D performance due to media coverage.

We build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with financial repression and conduct estimation and simulation with it using aggregate data. We discuss the interaction and optimal combination of fiscal and monetary policies when the model features SOE monopoly and financial repression. We find that under current situation, fiscal policy should play a bigger role in stabilizing output, while monetary policy ought to pay more attention to combatting inflation. Although private firms' limited access to credit can be attributed to financial repression and SOE monopoly, financial repression is a second-best policy, in that it promotes SOE's output via cheap credit when SOEs behave like monopolists. This offsets the efficiency loss associated with monopoly. Moreover, our policy experiments show that the optimal fiscal policy can respond less to output fluctuations, when SOE reforms dampen the significance of financial repression.