If trade barriers are managed by inefficient institutions, trade liberalization can lead to greater-than-expected gains. We examine Chinese textile and clothing exports before and after the elimination of externally imposed export quotas. We find that the surge in export value and decline in export prices following quota removal is driven by net entry, and show that this dominance is inconsistent with use of a productivity-based allocation of quota licenses by the Chinese government. Our counterfactual implies that elimination of misallocated quotas raised the overall productivity gain of quota removal by 28 percent.
JEL:
F1
[url=]The Evolution of the Migrant Labor Market in China, 2002-2007[/url]
Date:
2011
By:
John Knight (Beijing Normal University)
Quheng Deng (Beijing Normal University)
Shi Li (Beijing Normal University)
This paper highlights the employment patterns of China's over-45 population and, for perspective, places them in the context of work and retirement patterns in Indonesia, Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom. As is common in many developing countries, China can be characterized as having two retirement systems: a formal system, under which urban employees receive generous pensions and face mandatory retirement by age 60, and an informal system, under which rural residents and individuals in the informal sector rely on family support in old age and have much longer working lives. Gender differences in age of exit from work are shown to be much greater in urban China than in rural areas, and also greater than observed in Korea and Indonesia. Descriptive evidence is presented suggesting that pension eligible workers are far more likely to cease productive activity at a relatively young age. A strong relationship between
In the 3 years before the 2008 Financial Crisis, GDP growth in sub Saharan Africa (averaged over individual economies) was around 6%, or 2 percentage points above mean growth rates for the preceding 10 years. This period also coincided with significant Chinese FDI flows into these countries, accounting for up to 10% of total inward FDI flows for certain countries in these years. We use growth accounting methods to assess what portion of this elevated growth can be attributed to Chinese inward FDI. We follow Solow (1957), Dennison (1962), and others and use data for individual economies between 1990 and 2008 to calculate Solow residuals for these years for individual economies. We use capital stock data, workforce, and factor share data by country. Capital stock data is unavailable directly, and so we use perpetual inventory methods to construct the data. Factor shares come from UN National Accounts data. We then run counterfactua
JEL:
F21
[url=]Speeding Up the Product Cycle: The Role of Host Country Reforms[/url]
Date:
2011-10
By:
Sheng, Liugang (University of California, Davis)
Yang, Dennis Tao (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
We study the effects of policy reforms in the South on the decisions of intrafirm and arm's length production transfers by Northern firms. We show theoretically that relaxing ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to expand product varieties to host developing countries, and that a combination of the two reforms has an amplifying effect on product transfers. Consistent with these implications, we find that ownership liberalization and judicial quality played an important role in raising the extensive margin of processing exports in China for the period of 1997-2007. Our findings imply that institutional reforms in developing countries can effectively speed up the product cycle.
We explore the impact of a tax reform in some provinces of China which eliminated the value-added tax on some investment goods. While the goal of the experiment was to encourage upgrading of technology, our results suggest that there was no evident increase overall in fixed investment, and employment fell significantly in the treated provinces and sectors. The reform reduced the total number of employees for all types of firms. For domestic firms, it reduced employment by almost 8%. Our results are robust to a variety of approaches, and suggest that the primary impact of the policy has been to induce labor-saving growth. This experiment has since been extended to the rest of China.
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