Economics and Information Theory

China's economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China's institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve the "China puzzle," this paper analyzes China's institution—a regionally decentralized authoritarian system. The central government has control over personnel, whereas subnational governments run the bulk of the economy; and they initiate, negotiate, implement, divert, and resist reforms, policies, rules, and laws. China's reform trajectories have been shaped by regional decentralization. Spectacular performance on the one hand and grave problems on the other hand are all determined by this governance structure. ( JEL O17, O18, O43, P21, P25, P26)

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The Fundamental Institutions of China's Reforms and Development

Professor Titmuss, an eminent English social theorist, believes that man is inherently altruistic and that the duty of government is to create that social and economic climate which best channels man's drive to work together for the common good. In support of this belief, he has written a book about the procurement, distribution, and transfusion of human blood, a medical topic which he employs as an illustrative social and economic microcosm. The conclusion he reaches is foregone: "The voluntary socialized system in Britain is economically, professionally, administratively and qualitatively more efficient than the mixed, commercialized, and individualistic American system" (Titmuss, R.M: "Why Give to Strangers?" Lancet 1 :123-125, 1971). As the book was written with a bias, so will it be read with bias. My own bias is that of an American and a blood-banker. I am only too conscious of many deficiencies in the American complex of arrangements—it isn't

The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy

This article presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies. We categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. Job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts, whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective. Training programmes are associated with positive medium-term impacts, although in the short term they often appear ineffective. We also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters, but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate.

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Active labor market policy evaluations: a meta-analysis

A key open question for theories of reference-dependent preferences is what determines the reference point. One candidate is expectations: what people expect could affect how they feel about what actually occurs. In a real-effort experiment, we manipulate the rational expectations of subjects and check whether this manipulation influences their effort provision. We find that effort provision is significantly different between treatments in the way predicted by models of expectation-based reference-dependent preferences: if expectations are high, subjects work longer and earn more money than if expectations are low.

Reference Points and Effort Provision

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/10503.pdf

A numerical simulation analysis of (Hukou) labour mobility restrictions in China

/pdf/higher-educational-transformation-in-china-and-its-global-1xak7n39ai.pdf

Higher Educational Transformation in China and Its Global Implications

This chapter documents the major transformation of higher education that has been underway in China since 1999 and evaluates its potential global impacts. This has involved major, new resource commitments to tertiary education and significant changes in organizational form, reflecting China’s commitment to continued high growth through quality upgrading and the production of ideas and intellectual property, as set out in both the Tenth (2001–2005) and Eleventh (2006–2010) Five-Year Plans. The number of undergraduate and graduate students in China has been growing at approximately 20% per year since 1999, and the total number of graduates at all levels of higher education in China has increased by more than a factor of six in the last decade. Entering class sizes and total student enrolments have risen fast too, approximately quintupling. Prior to 1999 increases in these areas were much smaller. Much of the increased spending is focussed on elite universities, and new academic contracts differ sharply from earlier ones, which lacked tenure and often used annual publication quotas.

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The Higher Educational Transformation of China and Its Global Implications

We discuss metrics of globalization for individual economies as distance measures between fully integrated and trade restricted equilibria in economies initially operating under less than full integration with the global economy. Such metrics can be used to construct country globalization metrics reflecting the distance of economies from full global integration due to trade barriers, barriers to factor flows, barriers to international financial intermediation, solved technological diffusion and other economy-specific features yielding less than full integration into the global economy. Many distance metrics present themselves and none are wholly satisfactory since they each behave differently across various displacements from integration. Distance measures can, for instance, be small in goods space but large in price space. We present alternative measures constructed for eight OECD economies and comment in a concluding section on other measures used elsewhere in the literature such as trade/GDP ratios.

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Metrics capturing the degree to which individual economies are globalized

We explore how outcomes of trade policy retaliation (Nash tariff games) are affected when trade simultaneously takes places geographically across countries and through time via financial intermediation. In such models deficits and surpluses in goods trade are endogenously determined, and retaliatory trade policy towards goods can affect these and monetary trade models show different retaliatory trade outcomes from conventional goods only models. We use a general equilibrium goods trade model which also captures trade through time in the form of inside money as used in macro literature on one good overlapping generations models. In this model the deficit or surplus of any country in goods trade is endogenous determined. Optimal trade policy differs from that in a conventional goods only trade model in that countries which run trade deficits in goods will have more strategic power through tariff policy (and surplus countries less) than in models with balanced trade. We calibrate such a model to China's trade with the rest of the world and explore two country tariff games using 2005 data. Results show the significant impacts on Nash outcomes of endogenizing the Chinese trade surplus in the model in this way.

Shunming Zhang

Papers

A numerical simulation analysis of (Hukou) labour mobility restrictions in China

Higher Educational Transformation in China and Its Global Implications

The Higher Educational Transformation of China and Its Global Implications

Metrics capturing the degree to which individual economies are globalized

Trade Retaliation in a Monetary-Trade Model