Asian-Pacific Economic Literature最新文献

As the China's imported food volume is increasing for more than 10 years, the higher import prices and price differences in various regions are attracting more attention. Based on the micro-firm database of China Customs from 2004 to 2015, this study explores the impact of market fragmentation on food import prices at the HS8. The study finds that fragmentation of the domestic market has a positive effect on import food prices. Domestic market fragmentation has created a favourable environment for price discrimination, resulting in the food import price difference in various domestic regions. Foreign firms export food to high-income regions with high-quality in order to set higher price, which eventually led to the high and rising food import price in China. For this reason, actively promoting the domestic cycle and deepening the market integration of the domestic food market are the two key points to maintain high-quality development of China's import food industry.

This study analysed the relationship between the implementation of the Central Bank of Korea's tight monetary policy due to the recent deepening of inflation and the soundness of Korean banks. This study focused on the fact that the recently published research results of Jung (2023) were different from previous research results. The traditional result is that tight monetary policy reduces loan defaults by shrinking banks' lending capacity. However, Jung (2023), who analysed banks in the EU, claims that loan defaults do not increase despite easing monetary policy. This study empirically analysed the risk indicators that evaluate the financial soundness of banks by dividing them into the financial insolvency, financing costs, recapitalization, and risk holding. The research results are as follows. First, tight monetary policy reduces banks' loan defaults in line with Gambacorta and Mistrulli (2004) instead of Jung (2023). Second, banks' financing costs increased due to the tight monetary policy with same context to the claims of Borio and Hofmann (2017) and Jung (2023). Third, banks' recapitalization level actually decreased due to tight monetary policy as argument of Jung (2023). Fourth, tight monetary policy had no significant relationship with banks' risk taking behaviour in consistent with Diamond and Rajan (2011) and Jimenez et al. (2012). In conclusion, tight monetary policy reduces insolvency of loans, but increases potential risk factors such as increased financing costs and reduced recapitalization in the future. Therefore, this study suggests novel findings and policy challenges.

Increasing rural public investment is crucial for sustainable rural development and can be an effective approach for reducing inequality. However, wage inequality has increased in some developing countries (e.g., China) after increasing fiscal support. This study explores how rural public investment influences skilled-unskilled wage inequality by incorporating agricultural modernization in small-scale agriculture. Agricultural modernization refers to introducing modern non-agricultural intermediate inputs in agriculture. Owing to the small scale of agriculture, an intermediate sector, the agricultural producer service sector, is required to facilitate this process. We establish a three-sector general equilibrium model with a two-layer vertical production structure and investigate the effects of increased public investment in rural areas on the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labour. The theoretical results show that while more rural public investment raises the wages of both skilled and unskilled labour, it also increases wage inequality. Overall, this study explains why inequality widens as rural public investment increases.

This study examines the influence of state-owned equity participation on green innovation in private enterprises. Using the data of China's A-share private listed companies between 2009 and 2021, the paper finds that state-owned equity participation has a positive impact on corporate green innovation and this finding remains consistent and dependable after conducting a series of robustness tests. In addition, this paper also uncovers that the impact of state-owned equity participation on corporate green innovation differed across regions, industries, and external corporate governance. The results show that the incentive impact of state-owned equity participation on green innovation is more pronounced in private enterprises with higher levels of intellectual property protection in the region where they are located, belonging to high-tech industries and with higher media attention. Further mechanism analysis reveals that state-owned equity participation enhances corporate green innovation by improving the fulfilment of corporate environmental responsibility and alleviating corporate financing constraints. Overall, this study enriches the research of green innovation influencing factors from the perspective of minority state-owned equity and can help to inspire governments to make full use of state-owned equity to promote the green transformation of private enterprises, thus contributing to the sustainable development of the global economy.

Indonesia has been seeking to improve its investment climate. The most recent development in this process is the enactment of a ‘Job Creation Law’, which aims to achieve improvement in the investment climate through simplifying red tape, eliminating large numbers of overlapping regulations, and adopting a Risk-Based Assessment approach to business licensing. In parallel with this development, the Indonesian Government is pursuing an Import Substitution Strategy (ISS) to help preserve external balance while fostering local activity. In this paper, the recursive dynamic GDyn-FS model of the global economy is used to highlight the positive impacts of improving the investment climate, on national investment and trade over time, and the flow-on impacts to industries and households. On the other hand, the analysis indicates that the pursuit of an ISS, while possibly favouring protected activities, is likely to act as an ongoing drag on the wider economy.

This book establishes Marcus Mietzner as the preeminent scholar of the democratic Indonesian presidency. Most individual chapters are masterpieces of analysis. They are based on a quarter century of research, extensive interviews from the presidents on down, thorough grasp of the scholarship, plus press coverage, including obscure media. Most originally, Mietzner asserts that the stability of Indonesia's two 10-year coalitional presidencies is causally related to Indonesia's widely observed democratic decline over the same period. ‘It substantiates the hypothesis that while coalitional presidentialism helps to explain Indonesian democracy's endurance, it also caused and sustained many of its defects’ (p. 30). The book's innovative causal argument, however, fails to persuade. This is partly because of sharp and in the end fatal differences in the behaviour of the two presidents he examines (the first obeyed the democratic constitution, the second systematically degraded it). Importantly, Mietzner also fails to understand the main drivers of the economy, which hobbles his ability to evaluate their economic policy successes and failures and the implications for democracy and modernity.

Coalitional presidencies in the comparative politics literature occur in democracies with presidential (as opposed to Parliamentary) governments and multi-party systems. To govern stably, minority presidents have to build majority coalitions. In Indonesia, Mietzner argues, presidents govern not just through the legislature, but also by adding other state and non-state actors to their coalitions. Their goal is to ‘fend off impeachment and allow for more effective governance’ (p. 24). Adding these actors, Mietzner claims, better explains the Indonesian case and broadens our theoretical understanding.

Mietzner begins by locating Presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–2014) and Joko Widodo (2014–2024) in their historical and institutional contexts. Indonesia's first two presidents, founding father Sukarno (1945–1965) and Army General Suharto (1966–1998), were autocrats with complex legacies. Mietzner's account is balanced and authoritative. The first test of his theory is to determine whether Presidents Yudhoyono and Widodo did in fact govern this way. How did each engage state and non-state actors: parties, legislature, military, police, bureaucracy, local governments, oligarchs, and Muslim organisations? In each chapter, the power resources, formal and informal, of the other actor (such as the parties, legislature, military and so on) are addressed first, followed by those of the president, then the engagement between them, followed by an illustrative case study. In many of these chapters, Mietzner's brilliant analysis is miles ahead of previous studies.

On parties, a puzzle for analysts is why have both presidents created oversized party coalitions in parliament? Mietzner shows that Indonesian parties perform multiple functions that overlap with