Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

The study examines the relationship between regional convergence, economic growth and government hierarchies, with a specific focus on the province managing county (PMC) reform policy in China. The motivation for this research stems from the observation that a substantial portion of the increased inequality in China is attributable to disparities at the county level. This underscores the necessity for policies that address regional inequalities at the county level while simultaneously promoting sustained economic growth. We employ a time-varying quasi-natural experiment to explore how this reform has influenced regional convergence and economic growth within the sample period. The outcomes reveal that the PMC reform had a detrimental impact on regional convergence, hindering it by an average of 2.6%, while economic growth received a modest increase of 0.36%. The study also reveals notable heterogeneity in the effects of the reform, contracted disparities in western region, alongside exhibiting widened disparities and higher growth in eastern & central region. The study also investigates the underlying mechanisms, finding that expenditures on basic provisions reduced, while county revenue and investment expenditures increased following the policy change. It proposes that the increased investment in capital expenditures stimulated economic growth but came at the cost of hindering regional convergence.

Perception-based survey questions have been widely employed to evaluate the business environment. In the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, such questions involve rating an element of the business environment at the end of each section of the survey instrument. They often elicit responses inconsistent with similar questions based on the firm's experience over a specific timeframe. In this study, an experiment is analysed that randomizes the placement order of the perception-based questions either at the end of a section or at the beginning of the survey. Significant question-order effects are uncovered for perceptions of corruption (9%–13% point) and business licencing and permits (7%–8% point) but not the other elements after accounting for a variety of factors; there are no questions-order effects for experience-based questions. The study recommends that analyses in these two areas validate perception-based questions with corresponding experience-based questions. This adds to a larger literature that emphasizes the importance of data quality and its far-reaching economic benefits especially in guiding policy.

We empirically examine the effects of basic research on the technological capabilities of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms. Using manually collected corporate publication data to measure basic research activities, our findings reveal that firms with higher quantities and quality of basic research tend to engage in innovation activities within their existing knowledge base. These firms explore a broader range of technological fields and demonstrate enhanced capabilities in utilizing and creating knowledge. They also exhibit higher levels of both quantity and quality in their innovation output, which remains stable over time. Moreover, firms with basic research maintain their technological advancement even after facing external sanctions from the U.S. Heterogeneous analysis reveals that the impacts of basic research are more pronounced in mature and larger firms. This study highlights the significance of basic research for corporate technological catch-up efforts in transitioning middle-income countries during the later stages of catch-up.

Most long-term GDP projections in developed countries expect a substantial decline in GDP growth rates over time. The main factor behind it is demographic changes, especially the decreasing working-age population. We argue that these projections do not consider improvements in the quality of the human capital, which may, at least to some extent, mitigate the effects of the negative demographic shock. We start with a simple observation—the skills of younger age cohorts are higher than of older cohorts. Assuming that the current level of skills will be obtained also by the generations which will enter the labour market in the future, the average level of skills among the working-age population will increase. Trying to catch this effect, we use the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies standardised test results to create an aggregate human capital measure, the average skill level of the work force, for 18 European Union countries and project it until 2040. We show that on average at least one sixth of the negative impact of the shrinking of the working-age population can be offset by the increase in the quality of human capital and that this number can increase to three quarters in a less conservative scenario.

This paper utilises the staggered county-level rollout of China's E-commerce entering villages policy to examine the effect of policy-driven platform economy development on local entrepreneurship. Exploiting county-level variations in yearly new business registration with a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that policy-driven platform economy development decreased the number of new business registrations and business entry rates by approximately 4.6% and 0.6%, respectively. The reduction effect is more prominent in business registration in micro-small scale, tertiary industries, eastern regions, and rural areas. Microfinance plays a positive role in this association. Mechanism analysis shows that the platform-driven supply chain transformation could rule out entrepreneurial opportunities, and the platform-enabled gig work opportunities could weaken entrepreneurial motivation. Loss of entrepreneurial opportunities and motivation leads to less entrepreneurship.

This study tries to identify the impact of recent economic turmoil including the COVID-19 pandemic and global financial crisis on a corporation's banking relationships. Using a wide range of unique data from 2008 to 2020 in the Korean loan market, this study compares the two crises periods to the ordinary periods. It is found that the effects of firm-specific factors on banking relationships are strengthened (for loan amount) or weakened (for corporate size and credit rating) during the two crises. However, for the industrial sector a firm belongs to, the interaction effects of the crises show opposite signs.

This paper characterizes the power dynamics of firms in product and labour markets in Lithuania between 2004 and 2018. We first show that both markets are not perfectly competitive, as both price markups and wage markdowns are far from unitary and homogeneous. We show that the dynamics of these margins followed different patterns. On the one hand, dispersion and the economy-wide markup have increased, suggesting an increase in product market power. On the other hand, we document a decline in monopsony power, as heterogeneity and the aggregate markdown have declined. Altogether, our results underscore the importance of jointly analyzing product and labour markets when assessing firms' market power.

To examine the important role of regional intellectual property (IP) protection, we empirically check the impact of infringement disputes on corporate innovation investment persistence. We document that IP protection enforcement can significantly and negatively mitigate the infringer's innovation investment persistence but positively enhance that of the infringed firm. This effect is more pronounced for non-high-tech or non-state-owned firms. Moreover, IP protection mainly reshapes a firm's perceptions of innovation investment persistence through the efficiency and fairness of law enforcement. Our findings provide insights into optimizing the IP protection environment, especially for emerging economies.

At the turn of the millennium, developing countries face a twofold challenge. First, for reasons related to both intra- and inter-generational justice, these countries need to follow sustainable development pathways. Second, they need to understand the deep principles underpinning informality, which is by now recognized as a structuring phenomenon of their economies. This paper sheds light on the relationship between these two goals by investigating how a Nigerian firm being formal versus informal affects its sustainable and responsible innovation (S&RI) activity. Using the entropy balancing methodology to analyze a novel database extracted from the Nigerian Business Innovation Surveys, we find that registered Nigerian firms engage in S&RI much more than those that are not. This suggests that, from the perspective of sustainable development, there should be no hiatus between recognizing the important role of the informal sector in the economy and promoting policies that give firms incentives to exit from it. By encouraging the registration of firms operating informally, these policies should help Nigeria in its transition to a sustainable market economy.

This study examines the effect of bilateral political ties on the stability of service exports. The results show that the deterioration of political ties can decrease the stability of service exports by strengthening non-tariff barriers and weakening immigration networks. A decrease in voting similarity among trading partners in the United Nations General Assembly corresponds to heightened instability in service exports. In particular, political ties have a more pronounced impact on the stability of tourism service exports than on other services. Developing countries, in contrast to developed countries, should pay particular attention to the impact of political ties on the stability of service exports. Moreover, improvements in technological advantages and Internet openness in exporting countries can weaken the impact of political ties.