Structural Change and Economic Dynamics最新文献

The strategic importance of total factor productivity (TFP) in the high-quality development phase of enterprises is increasingly prominent, and understanding the impact of regional judicial capacity on corporate TFP is crucial. We treat the establishment of Circuit Courts as a quasi-natural experiment for regional judicial capacity and construct the staggered difference-in-differences model to examine how regional judicial capacity affects corporate TFP. We find that the establishment of Circuit Courts significantly enhances corporate TFP. Mechanism tests show that the establishment of Circuit Courts improves the macro-level market competition environment, legal environment, and contractual environment, enhances micro-level resource allocation efficiency, strengthens innovation capacity, reduces bribery expenses, eases financing constraints, and promotes specialized division of labor, thereby improving corporate TFP. The positive effects of Circuit Courts are more pronounced among firms in regions with higher levels of local protection and administrative intervention, lower levels of intellectual property judicial protection, weaker product market competition intensity, and among non-state-owned enterprises without political connections. Our results remain robust after a series of robustness and endogenous tests. Overall, this study not only reveals the important role of judicial capacity enhancement on enterprise development, but also provides evidence support for deepening the reform of the judicial system and improving the Circuit Courts system.

We calibrate a network model and monetary shocks based on empirical data from input-output tables for the Russian economy. We examine various aspects of the propagation of monetary shocks, such as the dispersion of relative prices and the local peak values of the aggregated price index achieved during the convergence to the new equilibrium. We show that these developments depend significantly on the way new money is injected into the economy.

We use a staggered difference-in-differences model to empirically investigate the relationship between airports and entrepreneurship, based on county airport data and the number of newly registered companies in China. The data has advantages in the long sample research framework from 2000 to 2019. We find that counties with airports have 14 more entrepreneurial opportunities per 10,000 people compared to samples without airports. The main conclusions still hold after conducting various robustness checks. We also find that airports have a spillover effect on entrepreneurship. A county without an airport still has higher entrepreneurship if there are more airports in the surrounding county-level city or province. Heterogeneity analysis shows that airports boost entrepreneurship more in service industries and other tertiary sectors. The effect is strongest in poorer regions and private firms and knowledge-intensive areas benefit more from airports for entrepreneurship. Finally, we find that airports increase entrepreneurial activity in a region by bringing in foreign investment, improving innovation, and upgrading industries.

With the continuous development of economy, resource-based cities in China are in urgent need of transforming and upgrading their industrial structures. This article utilizes panel data of 114 resource-based cities from 2011 to 2021 to explore the impact and mechanism of digital economy on optimizing and upgrading industrial structure. The findings, demonstrating a nonlinear relationship, reveal that digital economy promotes the advancement of the industrial structure in resource-based regions significantly. Technological innovation and financial development serve as the intermediary channel of facilitating the advancement of industrial structure in digital economy through intermediary effect analysis. Moreover, in terms of regional heterogeneity, digital economy is more effective in assisting inland resource-based cities in achieving advanced industrial structure compared to coastal areas in China.

Aging constitutes the dominant demographic challenge globally. The demographic transition entails a paradigm shift in the economic model to accommodate economic structures to life-expectancy gains. The socioeconomic implications from this transition remain largely undefined conceptually from an integrated perspective and unrecognized in official statistics. This study introduces a multidimensional and multi-actor reference framework, and a composite indicator, the Senior Economy Tracker (SET), to measure national readiness and progress in adapting to the demographic transition, over time and across countries. We apply our indicator to 27 European countries in 2010-2021. Our study reveals crucial differences in pathways and stages of maturity in addressing the socioeconomic impacts of aging. The proposed indicator aims to guide action to adapt economic structures to longer life spans, assist organizational and individual decision making, facilitate the development of effective policy interventions and raise awareness of the demographic transition.

This study examines the impact of air pollution on exports in China using a regression discontinuity design based on the Qinling Mountains-Huai River line. The findings show that air pollution harms firm exports, with a more pronounced impact on non-state-owned enterprises, heavily polluting industries, and densely populated regions. Specifically, a 1 % increase in air pollution correlates with an average reduction of 0.661 % in exports. These inhibitory effects are mainly caused by decreasing productivity, reducing markup rates, damaging regional quality reputations, causing labour resource misallocation and strengthening environmental regulations. Although air pollution spillovers from neighbouring cities may temporarily boost local firm exports and total production, they do not fully mitigate the overall negative impact of air pollution.

This work provides new evidence on the structural change processes undertaken by countries trapped in the middle-income trap (MIT) by applying a comprehensive approach, from both the supply and the demand sides. First, it provides evidence that there is a regular trapping mechanism, determined by the interaction between external demand constraints and the level of complexity of the economies. External constraint operates since MIT countries depend on exogenous prices to grow. Meanwhile, that constraint relaxes as the complexity of production increases. Second, it presents a novel identification of the MIT countries trajectories using indicators of economic complexity. A typology of the varieties of MIT is built according to the level of complexity of national economies and the relatedness between their current productive structure and more complex goods. It shows that having reached certain levels, further increases in supply complexity require a deepening of structural change through unrelated diversification.

With the intensification of transnational economic activities, industrial robots have been making inroads into developing countries. However, few studies have analyzed how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects the diffusion of industrial robots among domestic enterprises in developing countries. To bridge the gap, we combine several datasets to empirically examine the causal relationship between high-tech FDI and the robot adoption by domestic manufacturers in China. We discover a significantly positive impact of high-tech FDI on the adoption of industrial robots by domestic manufacturers, evidenced by the expansion in both stock and flow, as well as an increase in the variety of robots. Mechanism tests indicate that this effect can be achieved through both proactive learning and absorption of external technology, as well as through passive participation in more intense market competition. Moreover, the impact of high-tech FDI on robot adoption is more salient among enterprises with stronger absorptive capacity as well as those characterized by lower labor intensity and higher energy intensity.

This paper presents a case study of employment trends in Brazilian agriculture between 1950 and 1980. Using primary data, I document the displacement of workers from large and mid-sized establishments and the expansion of self-employment in an increasingly fragmented smallholding sector. I compute novel measures of rural population and find significant corresponding trends in employment-to-population ratios, thus contributing new evidence of the persistence of rural underemployment in a period of fast industrialization and growth. I conclude by examining the main rural development policies adopted in the period within a coherent framework for understanding the adoption of technical innovations. I argue, in particular, that the State concentrated price and credit subsidies on large and mid-sized producers and neglected investments in research, extension, and rural infrastructure. This policy mix interacted with Brazil’s dual agrarian structure and enhanced the incentives for the adoption of labor-saving innovations.

We investigate the evolution of the impact of monetary policy (MP) shocks in Peru in 1996Q1-2018Q2 using a set of time-varying parameter VAR models with stochastic volatility (TVP-VAR-SV), as proposed by Chan and Eisenstat (2018). The main results are: (i) the volatility of MP shocks falls during the Inflation Targeting (IT) regime; (ii) a contractionary MP shock decreases both GDP growth and inflation within a five quarters time span; (iii) the interest rate reacts faster to aggregate supply shocks than to both aggregate demand shocks and exchange rate shocks; (iv) under the pre-IT regime, MP shocks explain 20%, 10%, and 85% of the uncertainty in GDP growth, inflation, and the interest rate, respectively; and under the IT regime, all these percentages shrink to 1%–2%. The sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of the main results. In general, the results show that MP has contributed to diminishing macroeconomic volatility in Peru.