Wednesday 13 June 2007

Economic Analysis of China: Recent Research Round-up

As a new feature for this blog I will be posting a round-up of relevant academic papers that may be of interest to readers of "China Economics Blog" either directly or indirectly.

These are all papers I will read eventually but, as much as I would like, time does not permit a review of each paper. The source of these articles should ensure a high quality but this is not guaranteed (although NBER papers and similar are always of an excellent standard).

In some cases access to the article is free and in others there may be a cost. In any urgent cases email me at the address in the sidebar.

"Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries"
NBER Working Paper No. W12885

Contact: PINELOPI GOLDBERG
Yale University - Department of Economics, National
Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: penny.goldberg@yale.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=66688

Co-Author: NINA PAVCNIK
Dartmouth College - Department of Economics, Centre
for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), National
Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: nina.pavcnik@dartmouth.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=239672

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=961806

ABSTRACT: We discuss recent empirical research on how
globalization has affected income inequality in developing
countries. We begin with a discussion of conceptual issues
regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next,
we present empirical evidence on the evolution of globalization
and inequality in several developing countries during the 1980s
and 1990s. We then examine the channels through which
globalization may have affected inequality discussing theory and
evidence in parallel. We conclude with directions for future
research.


"China and the Knowledge Economy: Challenges and Opportunities"
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4223

Author: DOUGLAS ZHIHUA ZENG
World Bank
Email: Zzeng@worldbank.org
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=447561

Contact: SHUILIN WANG
World Bank
Email: swang2@worldbank.org
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=372583

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=984124

ABSTRACT: The rapid pace of economic growth in China has been
unprecedented since the start of economic reforms in late 1970s.
It has delivered higher incomes and made the largest single
contribution to global poverty reduction. Measured by
international poverty lines, from 1978-2004, the absolute poor
population in rural areas has dropped from 250 million to 26.1
million. Such gains are impressive and have been driven largely
by a set of market-oriented institutional reforms, strong
investment, and effective adoption and application of various
knowledge and technologies, especially foreign ones through trade
and foreign direct investment. While enjoying tremendous success,
China also faces many challenges that need to be addressed to
sustain its long-term development. These include weak
institutions, low overall educational attainment, weak indigenous
innovation capacity, poor links between research and development
and industries, and so on. This paper provides an analysis of
some strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges to
China's knowledge economy in the areas of economic incentives and
institutional regime, human capital, innovation system, and
information infrastructure.


"U.S. Multinational Activity Abroad and U.S. Jobs: Substitutes or
Complements?"

Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Vol.
46, No. 2, pp. 347-365, April 2007

Author: ANN E. HARRISON
University of California, Berkeley - Department of
Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER)
Email: HARRISON@ARE.BERKELEY.EDU
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=22455

Co-Author: MARGARET S. MCMILLAN
Tufts University - Department of Economics
Email: mmcmilla@tufts.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=280568

Contact: CLAIR NULL
University of California, Berkeley - Department of
Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER)
Email: claire@are.berkeley.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=780736

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=972542

ABSTRACT: Critics of globalization claim that firms are being
driven by the prospects of cheaper labor and lower labor
standards to shift employment abroad. Yet the evidence, beyond
anecdotes, is slim. This paper reports stylized facts on the
activities of U.S. multinationals at home and abroad for the
years 1977 to 1999. We focus on firms in manufacturing and
services, two sectors that have received extensive media
attention for supposedly exporting jobs. Using firm-level data
collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Washington,
D.C., we report correlations between U.S. multinational
employment at home and abroad. Preliminary evidence based on the
operations of these multinationals suggests that the sign of the
correlation depends on the crucial distinction between affiliates
in high-income and low-income countries. For affiliates in
high-income countries there is a positive correlation between
jobs at home and abroad, suggesting that foreign employment of
U.S. multinationals is complementary to domestic employment. For
firms that operate in developing countries, employment has been
cut in the United States, and affiliate employment has increased.
To account for firm size, substitution across firms and entry and
exit, we aggregate our data to the industry level. This exercise
reveals that the observed "complementarity" between U.S. and
foreign jobs has been driven largely by a contraction across all
manufacturing sectors. It also reveals that foreign employment in
developing countries has substituted for U.S. employment in
several highly visible industries, including computers,
electronics, and transportation. The fact that there were U.S.
jobs lost to foreign affiliates in key sectors, despite broad
complementarity in hiring and firing decisions between U.S.
parents and their affiliates, helps explain why economists view
the impact of globalization on U.S. jobs as benign despite
negative news coverage for declining industries.

"The Overvaluation of Renminbi Undervaluation"
NBER Working Paper No. W12850

Author: YIN-WONG CHEUNG
University of California, Santa Cruz - Department
of Economics, CESifo (Center for Economic Studies
and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)
Email: cheung@ucsc.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=193306

Contact: MENZIE DAVID CHINN
University of Wisconsin, Madison - Robert M. La
Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of
Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER)
Email: mchinn@lafollette.wisc.edu
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=15131

Co-Author: EIJI FUJII
University of Tsukuba - Graduate School of Systems
and Information Engineering
Email: efujii@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=193305

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=959127

ABSTRACT: We evaluate whether the Renminbi (RMB) is misaligned,
relying upon conventional statistical methods of inference. A
framework built around the relationship between relative price
and relative output levels is used. We find that, once sampling
uncertainty and serial correlation are accounted for, there is
little statistical evidence that the RMB is undervalued. The
result is robust to various choices of country samples and sample
periods, as well as to the inclusion of control variables.

"Gains and Losses of India-China Trade Cooperation ? A Gravity
Model Impact Analysis"

CESifo Working Paper Series No. 1970


Author: SWAPAN K. BHATTACHARYA
National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
Email: swapanb@grips.ac.jp
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=746231

Contact: BISWA N. BHATTACHARYAY
Asian Development Bank, CESifo (Center for Economic
Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)
Email: Bbhattacharyay@adb.org
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=349385

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=985274

ABSTRACT: As revealed by the trade intensity indices, India and
the People's Republic of China have significant bilateral trade
potential, which has remained unexplored until now. These
countries are presently negotiating for bilateral free-trade
arrangements based on their complementarities. This paper makes
an attempt to estimate the likely benefits in terms of gains or
losses in imports of both India and China due to different
preferential trading arrangements and free-trade arrangements
using the gravity model. Empirical results show that in the short
run India's potential gain is relatively lower compared to
China's because of its high tariffs but in the long run, India's
gains are higher than China's once its tariff levels are brought
at par with them. Free-trade arrangement is a win-win situation
for both countries and is consistent with their growing dominance
in international trade.


"State-Owned Enterprise Behaviour Responses to Trade Reforms:
Some Analytics and Numerical Simulation Results Using Chinese
Data"

NBER Working Paper No. W12780

Contact: JOHN WHALLEY
University of Western Ontario - Department of
Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER), CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo
Institute for Economic Research), Centre for
International Governance and Innovation (CIGI)
Email: jwhalley@uwo.ca
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=228908

Co-Author: SHUNMING ZHANG
Xiamen University - School of Economics
Email: szhang4@uwo.ca
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=336315

Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=953203

ABSTRACT: We note the absence of prior literature on analytical
structures to be used for China and other economies with
extensive SOEs when evaluating behavioural responses of SOEs to
trade policy and other changes. This is despite both the large
empirical literature discussing the productivity effects of
Chinese SOE enterprise reform, and wider policy discussion of the
potential impacts of various reform initiatives. We present two
simple analytical formulations of SOE behaviour in response to
trade policy change with the aim of investigating how traditional
competitive models of enterprise behaviour can mislead when used
in policy debate. One formulation centres on SOE managerial
control. In this enterprise managers are politically appointed,
expect any non performing loans to be recapitalized by state
banks andhence capital is centrally allocated by credit
rationing. The managers are assured to maximize the size of the
enterprise rather than profits since this yields maximal
networking benefits to managers. This implies labour is priced at
its average rather than its marginal product, and with a
competitive non-manufacturing (agricultural) industry free trade
is not optimal policy. The other assumes worker control of SOEs
and that workers satisfice in their supply of effort to the
enterprise given both fixed wage rates and enterprise employment
and otherwise shirk or pursue second jobs. In this formulation
the enterprise meets their budget constraint and covers costs.
With leisure in the preferences of enterprise members, their
leisure consumption will be implied by the satisfying behaviour
of the enterprise and will be non optimal. In both model
variants, implications for trade policy are different from those
of a standard competitive model, and computations using models
calibrated to 2003 Chinese data suggest the differences can be
large.

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