Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

This paper provides a feasible way to realize urban innovation through the e-commerce pilot. Based on the data of 289 cities in China from 2002 to 2019, we examine the impact of the National E-commerce Demonstration City pilot on urban innovation with a staggered difference-in-differences method. The results show that after becoming a pilot city of National E-commerce Demonstration Cities (NEDC), the quantity and quality of urban innovation have improved. Further, NEDC policy plays a greater role in promoting innovation in economically agglomerated areas, first-and third-tier cities and areas with a higher degree of marketization. Finally, NEDC policy can affect the level of urban innovation by optimizing the allocation of innovation factors, improving the efficiency of credit resource allocation and forming the logistics scale effect.

This paper empirically investigates how governments' COVID-19 relief policies have affected firms in 14 post-communist economies under the global value chain shortage between May 2020 and January 2022. We construct a panel dataset with firms that were continuously observed in three rounds of the World Bank's COVID-19 survey to comprehensively evaluate the dynamic changes in the firms' value chains, production, and finances. We further estimate the determinants of these changes, especially the roles played by the government. We find that under the impact of COVID-19, (1) reduced production capacity or reduced supply significantly increased the likelihood of reduced production and finances, whereas reduced demand had the opposite impact; (2) receiving support from the government augmented the impacts of affected production capacities and value chains; (3) among firms with restricted capacity or supplies, receiving government support increased the likelihood of reduced production and finances; and (4) among firms with abundant capacity and supplies, receiving government support lowered the likelihood of reduced production and finances. Other variables, such as firms' size, remote workforce, online businesses, and exports, also exhibit significant influences.

Whether and how are zombie firms associated with a crisis-rescue plan? We examine this issue through the channel of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We find that, after China's 2008 stimulus plan, a firm in the city with a high SOE share is more likely to become a zombie firm. This result may be driven by the fact that government-led investment, through SOEs, tends to focus more on employment-related projects than efficient ones, particularly during the crisis period. Resource misallocation associated with the crisis-rescue plan may cause production inefficiency, which leads to the emergence of zombie firms.

We investigate how distance from healthcare centres affects service utilization for women and children. Relying on five rounds of recent nationally representative demographic and health survey data from Bangladesh, our logistic regression analyses reveal that proximity to healthcare centres barely affects the utilization of healthcare services for women and children, even in rural areas. Interestingly, this indicates that the government's preferred Community Clinics have not significantly contributed to the country's uptake of healthcare services. The low-service utilization may result from their poor standard at the local health centres indicating that improving the service quality can help Bangladesh raise the uptake of healthcare services.

The industrial robot is an essential part of modern manufacturing. Using micro-level data, this study investigates the effects of industrial robots on the labour market in China. The results show that the adoption of industrial robots increases firm-level employment by 31.65%. Using the Bartik method, we construct robot penetration as an instrumental variable of robot adoption to tackle endogenous problems. Our results stand up to a series of robustness checks. Moreover, the effects of robots are mainly owing to the expansion of the output scale, increased productivity, and upgraded products. We also find the skill-biased impact of robots and the spillover effect of industrial robots through production networks.

Do the different types of financial friction have differential implications for monetary transmission in emerging economies? We investigate this question using India as the country for analysis. We adopt a New Keynesian business cycle model with bank intermediation, extend it by the Indian economy-specific features and validate with the data. The baseline model explains the co-movements of interest rates, incomplete pass-through and sluggish adjustment mechanism of the macro-financial variables for a policy interest rate shock. It identifies the collateral-constrained, financially excluded households and low proportion of savers as the primary sources of frictions causing weak monetary transmission.

Compared with privately owned enterprises (POEs), Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are 6 percent more likely to export, although SOE productivity and external financial ability are 0.9 percent and 20% lower, respectively. To account for SOEs' higher export propensity, we build a model of firms' export decisions, embodying productivity, internal and external financing ability, and two aspects of China's institutional background: invisible subsidies to SOEs and preferential lending. We apply the model to firms from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Survey Data, from 2003 to 2007, and find that SOEs' advantages in receiving invisible subsidies and more bank loans can significantly explain their higher export propensity.

This study investigates how the revenue pressure of local governments affects firm total factor productivity (TFP). To establish causality, we exploit a policy shock in China, that is, the cancellation of agricultural tax in 2005. Specifically, we document that governments suffering from sudden tax reduction substantially increase local firms' productivity in the subsequent periods. Furthermore, we use the difference-in-differences-in-differences approach to explore the potential channels through which the local fiscal squeeze improves firm productivity. Local firms increase capital and employment and adopt a higher capital-to-labour substitution for a higher TFP in response to the local governments' fiscal squeeze. We find that the effects of revenue pressure incentives on productivity are prominent in firms with low resource misallocation and high labour quality. Our finding suggests that local governments could improve firm productivity in response to fiscal revenue pressure by enhancing resource allocation efficiency and labour quality.

Since the late 1950s, Madagascar has experienced four constitutional changes and four crises of a political nature. In the present paper, we assess the economic effects of the 2009 Malagasy political crisis, which stands out from the three previous crises because of its suddenness and its duration. For this purpose, we use the synthetic control method, which involves determining the most credible counterfactual for the Malagasy economy from a subset of optimally weighted untreated countries. This empirical approach clearly shows that the output loss of this crisis is sizable, leading to a per capita income loss of around 25% 8 years after the start of the crisis. Sensitivity analyses applied to verify the robustness of our main result confirm that the effect of the 2009 Malagasy political crisis was unusually large. We then conduct an in-depth analysis to understand the main mechanisms that explain this output loss. We confirm that investments are probably the main determinants explaining the output loss after the crisis. We believe that our approach reveals that political instability is one of the main constraints preventing Madagascar from prospering.

Rainfall fluctuations are the major threats caused by climate change. This paper analyses the impact of seasonal rainfall fluctuations on rural poverty using panel data for 992 counties, which are located in humid zone in the south of China from 2000 to 2018. The findings are as follows: (1) Rainfall fluctuations significantly affect rural poverty, specifically, increased rainfall significantly alleviates rural poverty in the dry season, but aggravates rural poverty in the rainy season. (2) The effect of rainfall fluctuations on rural poverty is significantly heterogeneous in different regions. (3) Rainfall fluctuations put low-income areas at greater risk of returning to poverty. (4) The mechanism through which rainfall fluctuations affect rural poverty is agricultural production, and market regulation can mitigate the shock of rainfall fluctuations. Our research provides policy implications for developing countries to address the risks of poverty from climate change.