Structural Change and Economic Dynamics最新文献

This paper analyses the impact mechanisms of environmental investment on the productivity of listed firms in China. The empirical results show that, first of all, environmental investment has a significant negative impact on the productivity of listed firms, which confirms that listed firms have a typical compliance cost effect. Moreover, listed enterprises with low productivity and high productivity are less negatively affected by environmental investment than are listed enterprises with moderate productivity. Secondly, the first-order lag term of environmental investment has a significant inhibitory effect on the productivity of listed companies in the eastern region, but has no significant impact on the productivity of listed companies in the central and western regions. Finally, the increase in environmental investment has a great influence on the productivity of listed firms in heavily polluting industries, but it has no obvious influence on non-heavily polluting industries.

This study examines the effects of firm age and size on job creation and destruction of existing firms, using large-scale panel data from Japan. It contributes to the literature by examining the effects on firm-level job creation and destruction, differing from previous studies which focused on net employment growth (i.e., the difference between job creation and destruction for each firm) or job creation/ destruction on aggregated level (calculated by aggregating net employment increases/decreases of firms or plants). Results show that for an individual firm, age has significantly negative effects on the firm's job creation and destruction; however, size has a significantly negative effect on the firm's job creation but a significantly positive effect on its job destruction. Particular firm groups and different business cycles are further examined. The findings suggest that policy and managerial issues differ between a firm's expansion and aging.

This study examines the heterogeneous impact of environmental, social, governance, and digital (ESGD) factors on subjective well-being across 86 countries from 2005 to 2019, using Method of Moments Quantile Regression. The results reveal complex, nonlinear relationships between ESGD factors and well-being. CO2 emissions display an inverted U-curve, suggesting eventual negative impacts after initial gains. Our findings suggest that renewable energy only benefits higher quantiles, revealing affordability issues. Social and governance factors like labor participation and women's political participation relate nonlinearly to well-being across income levels, reflecting employment quality and social norms differences. Similarly, digital factors improve well-being in high-income countries but not lower-middle-income nations, due to economic complexity gaps and the digital divide. A “digital economy paradox” emerges where more digital skills combined with limited digital economies decrease well-being in lower-middle income countries signifying the need for tailored digital policies. This study enhances understanding of links between ESGD factors and well-being patterns.

The manufacturing sector has played an important role in the structural transformation process in the developing world by providing jobs and income opportunities. Using data from 131 developing countries from 1991 to 2020, we estimate the impact of trade liberalisation on manufacturing employment using panel fixed-effects and instrumental variable regression approaches. We find that trade liberalisation – on average – has harmed manufacturing employment in developing countries. There are considerable differences at the regional level; the impact has been most substantial in sub-Saharan African and Latin American countries. At least in these regions, trade liberalisation has contributed to deindustrialisation. Policies that improve labour productivity in manufacturing will increase the competitiveness of manufacturing firms in these countries in the face of growing trade globalisation.

This work addresses the nexus between Global Value Chains (GVCs) and within-country inequality by distinguishing two key dimensions: the “product-level positioning” of economies, i.e. their involvement in more upstream or downstream industries, and their “functional positioning”, defined by the value-adding activities performed along GVCs. Using trade and FDI data on 101 countries in 2003–2015, we show that a more upstream product-level positioning is associated with higher inequality in low- and middle-income countries. This is consistent with these countries’ greater involvement in industries supplying raw materials and energy inputs, characterised by a remarkable income polarisation. Conversely, a more downstream product-level positioning goes together with greater inequality in high-income countries, reflecting downward pressures on labour income due to massive outsourcing of inputs to foreign suppliers. As for functional positioning, we find that a greater involvement of economies in pre- and post-production stages is associated with lower income disparities, while a larger engagement in production operations goes together with higher inequality. This result is driven by low- and middle-income countries, suggesting that a greater involvement in knowledge-intensive GVC activities fosters technological upgrading in these economies, with beneficial effects also on the lower segments of the labour force.

Due to labor market reforms around 2003–4, Japan has a growing group of ‘non-regular’ workers who are easy to fire, and have poor carrier perspectives. This marks a break with the traditional Japanese model of life-time employment that allowed for intensive in-company training and commitment of personnel. Drawing from a national labor force survey, we find indications that employment of non-regular workers has a negative impact on productivity (proxied by wages), this negative impact being largest under innovation regimes that require a high cumulativeness of knowledge. Our findings are consistent with neoSchumpeterian research in Europe which concluded that certain labor market rigidities, while being undesirable from a neoclassical perspective, can be useful to innovation. Our paper confirms the impression from earlier research that structural reforms of labor markets along supply-side lines are likely to be one of the reasons for a substantial decline of productivity growth in major OECD countries since about 2004/05.

Global production beyond borders is becoming an invisible force for stabilizing employment, and the behaviour of firms featuring transnational corporations has become critical to the development of production. In this paper, we construct a systematic quantitative analytical framework of measuring global value chain (GVC) sticky relationships and analyze the steady growth of employment from the perspective of inter-firm interactions firstly, furthermore, provide the latest evidence from China. Our findings show that: multiple interactions between firms for that participate GVC contribute to the development of the GVC sticky relationships and promotion of employment growth, the GVC sticky relationship accounts for approximately 17.32 % of the total employment in China, and domestic GVC sticky relationship activities have become an important force in stabilizing and promoting employment growth in China, it surpasses cross-border GVC employment since 2008. Furthermore, we characterize the shape of GVC sticky relationships and find that the circle-structure relationship effect has greater potential to stabilize employment in China, particularly in the sectors of ICT, wholesale and retailor. Therefore, mitigating the transaction costs of participating in GVC by reducing institutional barriers in the process of firms' interactions is significant for maintaining the employment stability.

Stimulating green growth is an important element of China's economic planning. Green growth has dual attributes of greenness and growth, while economic growth targets and environmental targets respond to these two attributes, respectively. Whether the combination of dual targets is more effective than a single target is critical to understanding the dynamics of green development. Although scholars and practitioners have studied government performance targets, we know little about interaction effects of different targets in a multi-target system. This study considers the interaction effects of environmental and economic growth targets on green growth. Using panel data from China's provinces, we find both economic growth and environmental targets can drive green growth. However, these targets crowd out each other in driving green growth, implying a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. The crowding-out effect exhibits a clear inverted U-shaped trend influenced by environmental governance and technological support, as it is prominent mainly in provinces with moderate environmental governance and technological support. Furthermore, economic growth targets affect green growth by promoting investment in research and development, while environmental targets drive green growth by promoting industrial agglomeration. Notably, green innovation is a shared channel for both types of targets to influence green growth, making both targets crowd out each other. These findings suggest that we should value synergy between multiple targets in the future.

A basic underlying assumption in most of the research to date is that intermediate industry accounts of the economies in multiregional input-output (MRIO) tables exist and are accurate. In fact, if they exist at the subnational level, such accounts are, at best, roughly estimated and predicated on far less empirical information than is available for economies of nations. Moreover, intra-economy intermediate-industry flows are typically larger than the set of a region's commodity in- and out-flows. So, if intermediate industry flows in a set of MRIO accounts are noticeably mis-estimated, it follows that interregional trade coincidentally derived using them must be even more conspicuously in error.

We hypothesize as more information is used to estimate MRIO accounts, the better the estimates should be. We start our experiment by consolidating 2019 FIGARO accounts of the 27 member states of the European Union, while maintaining sectoral detail, to produce a “national account”. We then test several approaches to constructing MRIO tables. The approaches distribute interregional trade fully by receiving industry, as in FIGARO, as well as strictly in the form of a diagonalized matrix as if the commodity inflows are competitive imports. To do this, both a gravity model and RAS are applied to each approach. We then test to see how well the approaches estimate main features of FIGARO's MRIO accounts and detail a rather consistent ranking of the relative accuracy of them. We also find that the level of error inherent to the estimated MRIOs is markedly similar across approaches, particularly for multipliers. Further, relaxing interregional trade to a diagonalized matrix tends to add very little error. The approach that uses the least data is, however, markedly worse in replicating countries’ direct requirements matrices and Leontief inverses, which suggests its use in a more-limited set of applications.

This work inquires as to the impacts of the transition from combustion to electric vehicles in accordance with the Core/Semi-Periphery/Periphery configuration of the European automotive industry. We propose a double objective: i) to propose from a C-SP-P framework a methodology by which to analyze the reconfiguration of the European automotive sector in the transition to electric vehicles; and ii) to apply that proposal to an examination of the sector for the 2017–2022 period. Our findings reveal that this transition has been driving a reconfiguration where only Germany's automotive sector has maintained and consolidated its core position. Other economies such as France, Italy, the UK, and even Spain have seen their positions weakened (albeit for different reasons). The emergence of Hungary and Poland as hubs in battery production is not seen as sufficient to drive significant improvement in those countries’ positions, given the weakness they exhibit in other dimensions analyzed.