Asian-Pacific Economic Literature最新文献

This study examines whether a social pension for the elderly population affects the well-being and health of older adults in rural areas and whether pensions are more effective in rural areas than in urban areas. Using data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we exploit a difference-in-difference specification that compares changes in well-being and health in rural areas for those who are 65 or older relative to the younger population before and after a pension reform. We also consider a triple-difference specification to investigate the rural–urban difference. The results reveal that the expansion of the social pension significantly improved cognitive function and alleviated depressive symptoms among the rural elderly, but it had little impact on well-being or other health measures such as subjective health status. We also find that this impact has been more effective in rural than in urban areas. Our findings suggest that social pensions can be crucial in enhancing cognitive functioning and mental health for rural elderly individuals and emphasise the effectiveness of pensions for rural elderly populations.

Rapid education expansion has been a main driver of the remarkable economic growth in South Korea for last decades. However, in recent times, its excessive education credentialism is considered a hurdle against further developments. This study examined whether education bubble and inequality decreased during the Asian Financial Crisis 1997–98, the Global Financial Crisis 2008–09, and the COVID-19 pandemic 2020. It tracked quarterly distributional changes in private education expenditure of Korean households with Changes-in-Changes. The findings indicate that Korean households postponed private education expenditure cut in the first quarter of the crises to prevent their children from falling behind in severe education competition. Then, they temporarily downsized it in the second quarter. During the pandemic, vulnerable students experienced higher fluctuations in private education expenditure than they did in previous crises closely related to disproportionate effects of the pandemic on household income and consumption expenditure. Therefore, this study suggests more expansionary measures for disadvantaged students to recover from a learning loss and improving the public education system as a fundamental measure to mitigate severe private education dependency.

Technology entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in bolstering regional economic vitality, with the intellectual property rights (IPR) system serving as a fundamental safeguard for entrepreneurs' intellectual achievements. Using panel data encompassing 260 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019, we employ the count of registered technology-based enterprises to construct an indicator of technology entrepreneurship and consider China's IPR policy as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact of the IPR system on technology entrepreneurship. The findings reveal that the pilot policy can significantly stimulate technology entrepreneurship displaying a periodically dynamic promotional effect. This conclusion remains reliable even after undergoing rigorous robustness tests. The mechanism analysis demonstrates that the pilot policy can stimulate technology entrepreneurship by enriching the technological knowledge base and providing financial guarantees. Notably, while the policy's impact on technology entrepreneurship increases with the expansion of the city scale across different scenarios, no discernible regional disparities emerge. This study provides a new perspective on the relationship between the IPR system and entrepreneurship, offering valuable insights into improving the IPR framework in emerging developing countries.

Promoting digital industry development is an important path to accelerating high-quality economic development. Using the net growth rate of number of digital enterprises to measure the digital industry development and the data at the city level in China from 2005 to 2016 as a sample, this study analyses the mechanisms through which venture capital impacts on digital industry development. This study finds that the increase in venture capital will promote the digital industry development. The impact of the increase in venture capital on the digital industry development is mainly achieved by reducing the exit rate of digital enterprises. In inland areas and non-city group, the increase in venture capital can significantly promote the digital industry development and the magnitude of the impact is greater.

The survival of zombie firms severely crowds out healthy corporate investment and employment growth, eventually undermining economic growth potential. Hence, how to properly address the problem of corporate zombification is an essential part of achieving high-quality economic development in China. In recent years, the phenomenon of common institutional ownership has become increasingly widespread in the capital markets and has a significant impact on the strategic decisions of companies. There are currently two views on the corporate governance role of common institutional ownership: the synergistic governance effect and the collusive fraud effect. Using data from Chinese-listed firms from 2009 to 2021, this paper finds that common institutional ownership can significantly inhibit the formation of zombie firms. The higher the degree of their linkage and the greater the shareholding, the more pronounced the synergistic effect. The findings remained valid after considering the endogeneity issue and conducting robustness tests. Furthermore, the mechanism test suggests that common institutional ownership inhibits the formation of zombie firms by improving internal control quality and reducing agency costs. This paper contributes to the study of how to inhibit the formation of zombie firms by identifying common institutional ownership from the perspective of external governance mechanisms. In addition, this paper enriches the research on the economic consequences of common institutional ownership. Finally, various practical implications for policymakers may be realised, which may help curb the trend of corporate zombification through equity-based instruments.

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalisation on the wage premium using firm level data for Thai manufacturing as the case study. Tariff protection is applied here to represent trade liberalisation, in terms of both nominal and effective tariffs. Output and input tariffs are separately examined to assess nominal protection, while for effective rates of protection (ERP), both a traditional ERP measure and a measure incorporating possible water in tariffs and the effect of FTAs are applied. In addition to tariff protection, the impact of GVCs, considered through trade in parts and components (P&Cs), on the wage premium is investigated in the study. Our results show that firm-specific factors are more crucial in affecting the wage premium than trade liberalisation and participation in global production networks. With trade liberalisation, only input tariffs matter in determining the wage premium while an insignificant relationship is observed when either output tariffs or ERPs are employed to reflect trade liberalisation. Participation in GVCs also has an insignificant impact on the wage premium. Wage-skilled employment decoupling is evident in the study, that is, trade liberalisation and GVCs have a negligible influence on the wage premium but have a significant influence in the case of relatively skilled workers. Trade liberalisation tends to lower demand for skilled workers in response to cheaper imported products, while participation in global production networks encourages more skilled workers.

Juzhong Zhuang, Peng Zhan and Shi Li, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, Volume 37, Issue 2, pp. 3–26, 2023. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/apel.12390

And the sentence immediately following Equation (10) “where the first term on the right is the sum of the quantity effects and the second term is the sum of the price effects.” was incomplete. It should be “where the first term on the right is the sum of the quantity effects, the second term is the sum of the price effects, and the third term is the residual effect.”

We apologise for this error.

This study explores the asymmetric effects of real effective exchange rate variation on domestic output in nine South East Asian nations. The study is the first thorough study on this issue for these countries. The results show that exchange rate fluctuations have asymmetric long-run and short-run effects on production in most nations. However, the findings vary across nations. Appreciation has a contractionary effect on production in most countries, while depreciation has an expansionary effect. In certain economies, an appreciation boosts domestic output whereas a depreciation diminishes it. Such conclusions can only be reached if appreciations and depreciations are separated, using non-linear models.

The real bilateral exchange rate between Korean won and Chinese yuan is a crucial factor in balancing trade between Korea and China and has implications for both academics and policymakers. Prior research using symmetry hypotheses on bilateral trade and its heterogeneity among industries is limited. This study re-examines the symmetric and asymmetric J-curve phenomenon between them, employing the linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag models. It considered the January 2008–June 2022 trade balance of 75 industries. This analysis shows support for the symmetric (asymmetric) J-curve in 4 of 12 industries from the linear (nonlinear) model, accounting for 58.55% of the total trade between Korea and China. Furthermore, short- and long-run asymmetries are detected in most industries, affirming the suitability of the nonlinear ARDL method.