Growth and Change最新文献

Finance is a critical factor in all stages of the food enterprise, from production to distribution, procurement, and consumption. Yet, in many developing countries, weak financial sector development and the prevalence of unregulated self-employed economic activities pose a significant challenge to food security. This study examines the extent to which the financial sector development and informality influence food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We develop a conceptual framework linking financial sector development to food production and test it empirically, controlling for the role of informality. The findings show that the effect of financial development on food production in SSA is inconclusive and sensitive to the measures employed. In terms of informality, total, female, and male self-employment are generally found to hinder food security, although the magnitude and direction of these effects differ across income and regional groupings. Importantly, the interaction between financial sector indicators and informality measures suggests that access to finance enhances the potential of the informal sector to contribute positively to food production. These findings suggest that developing countries should prioritize both the regulation of the informal sector and the strengthening of financial sector institutions to expand access to finance. Their combined effects hold the potential to improve food production and, ultimately, food security in SSA.

Using microdata from rural China, we estimated the impact of rural infrastructure provision on the migration decisions of the floating population. We find that as the level of local public infrastructure provision increases, the amount of in-migration also increases, and this effect is more pronounced for individuals with work experience outside the countryside, however, it shows a downward trend from eastern, central, and western China sequentially. We find that the influx of in-migrants is facilitated by the improvement of livelihood-type infrastructure, including health care and education infrastructure, while in-migration is generally discouraged by improvements to agricultural production-type infrastructure. Our findings remain robust under alternative analyses. At the individual level, the demographic “pull” of rural infrastructure has a positive U-shape, that is, as people age, they tend to move to villages with better infrastructure, particularly for less educated laborers. At the household and village levels, migration decisions are a function of a range of public goods and factors, such as household car ownership, the presence of local non-farm industries, village location, local ecological, security conditions, employment, and income status. The findings of this paper contribute to the literature on rural population and rural revitalization issues and complement the literature related to rural-to-urban migration processes, which has found that two-way population mobility mechanisms contribute to sustainable urbanization and social stability.

While most existing research on territorial servitization has focused on its potential to revitalize mature industrial regions, much less has been said about its potential to incentivize knowledge-driven changes in manufacturing across developing economies. This article contributes to this topic by analyzing evidence for territorial servitization processes in Mexico, adopting a spatial panel data model approach, which uncovers space-time patterns to local-regional servitization processes. Findings reveal servitization positively impacts manufacturing productivity. Results also signal the relevance of local industrial contexts, as well as firm conditions, as key factors to the presence of positive impacts on productivity due to KIBS-manufacturing linkages, or manufacturing servitization.

With the rapid development of information technology, innovation no longer takes place within single sectors. Taking China's solar industry as a case, this paper analyzes the network structure of technology convergence between diversified standard industries based on the patent data of 328 cities from 2003 to 2020. From the perspective of both horizontal and vertical dimensions, this paper explores the mechanism of sector convergence on innovation performance and its regional heterogeneity. The results show that the convergence of the manufacturing sector and the production and supply sector of electricity, heating gas, and water is the main component of sector convergence of the solar industry in China. The level of sector convergence shows an overall upward trend and exhibits significant regional differences. The promotion effect of horizontal sector convergence on innovation performance is only reflected in larger cities, higher administrative-tier cities, and non-resource-based cities. Vertical sector convergence exerts significant positive impacts on innovation across cities of different city sizes, administrative tiers, and resource endowments, with stronger effects in smaller cities, lower administrative-tier cities, and resource-based cities. This study deepens the measurement knowledge of convergence among diversified standard sectors within a specific industry, reveals the mechanism of dual-dimensional sector convergence on innovation performance, and offers scientific evidence for developing convergence policies by zone.

Industrial exit plays a critical role in shaping regional industrial dynamics. Evolutionary economic geography studies often use co-occurrence and density methods to assess the likelihood of related and unrelated industries exiting a region. However, these traditional methods lack the ability to quantitatively distinguish related from unrelated exiting industries. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel quantitative method for differentiating related and unrelated exiting industries. We then explore the correlation between (un)related exits and economic complexity using data from the China Customs Database (2000–2012). The findings suggest that related exits dominate China's industrial exit paths, with relatively few unrelated exits, and the disparity between them is widening. Second, a significant and positive correlation between related exits and economic complexity is observed, while unrelated exits display a significant and negative correlation. Third, differences emerge between related and unrelated exits across various sectors and regions in China. The novel method for distinguishing related and unrelated exit industries holds the potential for application in other countries and regions, contributing to a more precise understanding of the patterns of regional industrial exit.

In the context of the nearby enrollment policy in China, parents’ pursuit of good educational resources has driven up the prices of school district housing. Concerning this situation, the Education Department of Zhejiang Province released the enrollment warning information for primary schools in October 2018. This information disclosure aims to guide parents to purchase housing rationally by publishing the lists of schools exceeding their enrollment capacity. Despite the policy’s practical meaning, its impact remains underexplored. Using Hangzhou, China as the study area, the current study quantitatively analyzes the effectiveness of enrollment warning disclosure through the housing market. With housing transaction data from 2018 to 2019, the study constructs the hedonic price model, difference-in-differences model, and quantile regression model to identify both average and heterogeneous effects. The results indicate that school quality is significantly capitalized into housing prices and the disclosure of enrollment warning information intensifies price differentiation between warning and non-warning primary school districts. In particular, the high-priced housing market is more sensitive to information disclosure with stronger responses observed among upper quantiles. Rather than mitigating demand, the release of the information reinforces homebuyers’ preference for high-quality schools. The empirical results and implications of this study are helpful to the continuation and optimization of warning information policy, contributing to education equity and sustainable urban development.

This paper incorporates water demand decisions by households and firms into an urban spatial model. Using both land-use and water demand data from the Denver Water service area, I calibrate the model to focus on four policy options to reduce urban water demand: (1) a “cash-for-grass” proposal to reduce irrigated lawn area, (2) relaxing development regulations to increase housing supply, (3) lowering the price of recycled water, and (4) raising the marginal price of potable water. The “cash-for-grass” policy reduces water demand, yet the policy is both costly and leads to an increase in the average household yard size. Loosening development regulations may lead to either a rise or fall in aggregate water demand. Lowering the price of recycled water increases demand by firms but lowers revenue for the water district. Numerical simulations suggest that raising marginal water rates are the most effective means of reducing aggregate water demand.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis has been widely debated in pollution studies, and its applicability to grassland ecosystems remains fragmented, particularly regarding the mechanisms driving inflection point shifts. This study presents the Grassland Environmental Kuznets Curve (GEKC) framework, using high-resolution county-level panel data (2000–2022) from China's pastoral regions to model grassland degradation and recovery dynamics. With System GMM estimation for endogeneity, a robust U-shaped GEKC is found: economic growth first degrades grasslands but shifts to restoration beyond a threshold. Notably, the GEKC inflection point arrives earlier in economically developed regions and temperate continental climate zones, suggesting regional heterogeneity in grassland responses to economic development. Four key pathways influencing the GEKC inflection point shift are identified: the grassland scarcity pathway reducing resource competition through land use optimization and efficient livestock practices; the grassland governance pathway enhancing ecological stewardship via policy interventions; the land intensification pathway boosting productivity with technological advancements; and the livelihood transition pathway lessening anthropogenic pressures through income diversification. These findings challenge the conventional EKC paradigm by demonstrating that strategic policy sequencing—prioritizing governance in early developmental stages and market mechanisms post-inflection—can decouple economic growth from grassland degradation.