Structural Change and Economic Dynamics最新文献

Urban water scarcity and severe consumption challenges are crucial for improving performance in the urban water supply industry. Urban Water Supply Utilities (UWSUs) perform the primary task of providing tap water to city residents, and regulators use benchmarks to monitor UWSU operations. To assess the efficiency of UWSUs in detail, this study introduces a dynamic two-stage network data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with shared inputs and shared carryover. This model decomposes UWSU operations into water production (WP) and water distribution (WD) subprocesses. By combining dynamic features with network DEA, the study extends the static network DEA to a more general case for evaluating UWSU efficiency. The study sample includes 246 UWSUs from 24 provinces in China over the period 2016–2018. The analysis covers overall efficiency, period efficiency, subprocess efficiency, and regional disparities among the sampled water utilities. The findings indicate that the average efficiency of the UWSUs was 0.643 during 2016–2018, with slightly lower efficiency in the WP subprocess. UWSUs in the eastern provinces outperformed those in the central and western provinces, which require significant improvements. To enhance the performance of China's water supply sector, accelerated market competition and infrastructure improvements are necessary.

Are recessions drivers of structural change? Here we investigate employment dynamics in the UK and show that a re-allocation of labour between industrial sectors in times of crisis induces an acceleration in structural change. Our key hypothesis is that cities with industrial baskets that exhibit strong potential for inter-industry labour mobility are more resilient as they can shift workers between sectors resulting in employment growth in some sectors — which in turn induces structural change during an economic crisis. Probing this hypothesis, we find that UK cities experienced a sharp increase in the rate of structural change at the city level around 2009 which coincided with an increase in inter-sectoral job transitions during the recession (2008–11) which persisted for years afterwards. To shed light on this, we deploy an econometric model to show that local employment in skill-related sectors, which captures the potential for inter-industry labour mobility, is most strongly associated with city-industry employment growth during the recession period.

This paper demonstrates an apparent long-term constancy of economy-wide energy expenditures relative to income – an inter-decadally-constrained sustainable (“Bashmakov-Newbery”) range of 4.2 ± 0.8 % relative to Gross Output, and 7.2 ± 1.5 % relative to GDP, based on data from industrialised countries. Initial evidence suggests the range to be narrower when external trade effects are accounted for. Statistically equivalent to a very-long-term price-to-energy-intensity elasticity of -1 (“Minus 1”), this indicates long-period economic dynamics including induced innovation and structural change, and we probe theories and policy implications. Either higher energy prices are fully offset by reduced energy intensity, or they later decline to match energy intensity improvements. Complementary theoretical approaches help to explain the observations but challenge the conventional economic logic that high environmental pricing should be the principal instrument to drive transformation. Rather, energy efficiency, innovation, deployment, structural change and pricing co-evolve, suggesting need for a diversity of complementary policy strategies implemented over extended periods of time.

The development of digital finance offers numerous development opportunities, particularly in the accessing of funds for enterprises that traditionally face financial constraints. The economic downturn globally and especially in China requires new policies for stimulating economic growth. The manufacturing industry in particular is apt for this kind of intervention. Although studies have examined these topics, several gaps exist in the literature, specifically in the area of the effect mechanism. Therefore, this study examines the direct relationship between digital finance and the total factor productivity (TFP) of manufacturing enterprises and discusses the mechanism of action between the two from the intermediary and entry/exit perspectives. The findings show that digital finance affects manufacturing TFP positively and significantly. The promotion effect of digital finance is more evident from the enterprise heterogeneity analysis, particularly for small- and medium-sized private and manufacturing enterprises with better growth. The effect mechanism analysis shows that digital finance affects manufacturing TFP positively by reducing financing constraints, improving the level of human capital, and enhancing enterprise risk-taking ability. From the perspective of enterprise entry and exit, the entry of high-productivity enterprises enhances market competition and is an important way that digital finance promotes the improvement of industry TFP.

This research analyzes the evolution of technological leadership in the global patents network, focusing on the roles of the US and China from 2001 to 2021. The US's central position in the network faces increasing challenges from China's economic and technological rise. This study goes beyond conventional approaches that analyze material capabilities by adopting a structural dynamic approach, which allows us to examine not only a country's centrality but also the mechanisms that lead a country to become central in the network. International technological influence is assessed through the global patents network by analyzing each country's position and growth mechanisms. The results show that, despite China's substantial growth in the network, the US remains the undisputed central power, benefiting from a growth mechanism that favors already central countries.

Leveraging a unique historical instrumental variable—the first introduction of modern technology during China's Self-Strengthening Movement—this study utilizes macro / micro-level dataset to analyze how robotization affects gender economic opportunities and subsequent life-cycle transitions. The analysis indicates that (1) gender gaps in labor force participation, income and working hour declined significantly more in regions that introduced robots compared to other regions, increasing the relative economic status of women; (2) regions with higher robot exposure tend to experienced also a decline in marriage and childbirth, although no notable change in divorce was observed; (3) these patterns may attributable to enhanced status of women in the labor market, which in turn diminishes their satisfaction with economic and domestic contributions of men and leads to prioritizing career advancement over marriage and childbirth. Overall, our evidence shows that robots have a substantial impact on labor market structures, with potential spillover effects on a series of demographic behaviors.

This paper presents a thorough examination of centralized use of a decentralized technology (blockchain) in monetary and financial systems at the national level. A comparative study is conducted to summarize the regulatory and legislative frameworks of currency/asset tokenization in seven major economies (US, EU, UK, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and South Korea). China is then used as a case study to explore how blockchain technology is adopted to enable central bank digital currency, bond tokenization, and “currency bridge”. Based on various contexts analyzed, we extend the Technology Acceptance Model, highlighting the roles of perceived benefits, perceived risks, and collaborative leadership in building trust in and promoting adoption of tokenization. Policymakers and practitioners are recommended to follow a gradual, eclectic, and collaborative approach to tokenization.

Some of the CEE countries, despite rising per capita incomes and their gradual convergence to the levels of Western European countries, have recently experienced a stabilization or even an increase in share of food in total households’ expenditure. This is, of course, inconsistent with the Engel's Law, which postulates that share of food in total expenditure in these countries should gradually converge to the levels observed in the Western European countries, as the per capita income gap narrows. Using panel regressions it was shown that a factor explaining this anomaly may be aspirations among CEE countries to emulate the Western lifestyle reflected in the disproportionately high share of processed food in their total expenditure on food and non-alcoholic beverages compared to their per capita income level. The results obtained can be helpful in understanding food consumption patterns in catching-up economies, which is important for analyzing inflationary processes in these countries.

This paper extends the Goodwin model of distributive cycles by incorporating the simultaneous endogeneity of technical change and labor supply within a classical-Marxian framework. It reinterprets induced innovation, suggesting that firms optimize mechanization to maximize cost reduction, obtaining a micro-founded relationship between mechanization and the wage share. Additionally, it assumes a positive relationship between labor supply and the employment rate. The resulting three-dimensional dynamical system includes wage share, employment rate, and capital-output ratio as state variables. The Hopf bifurcation theorem reveals the emergence of limit cycles as the employment rate's effect on labor productivity (reserve-army-creation effect) approximates a critical value from below. Numerical simulations for 10 OECD countries illustrate the cyclical nature of the model and its consistency with empirical patterns. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis explores the effect of parameters variations, emphasizing the social dimensions of productivity and labor supply as critical factors defining the stability of distributive cycles.

The Italian public debt is one of the largest in the European Monetary Union and its ratio debt/GDP is the second highest among the Monetary Union countries. A legitimate question is: why Italy has got the most important debt in the euro area? Until the beginning of 1980s the debt to GDP ratio remained within acceptable limits. The Italian debt trend shows a sharp increase in the beginning of 1980s in connection with a new policy of debt financing agreed between the Bank of Italy Governor and the Ministry of Finance in 1981 (the so called “divorce”) and fully implemented in the following 2-3 years. This paper aims to understand if the overall debt increase is related to the dynamics of interest or that of social expenditure, as argued by many scholars. The causal relationships were analysed by testing Granger-causality on long time series of data starting from 1960. A sample including series coming from National Accounts is utilised in estimating our models. The empirical results generally confirm that interest payment was the main driver of debt increase before the European monetary union was established, even assuming that interest policy responded to exchange rates and inflation.