Journal of Finance and Economics is supervised by Ministry of Education of PRC, and sponsored by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. It aims to include research results on the major theories and practical problems in China’s reform and opening up and modernization of economic construction. Its scope covers all the major fields of Economics, including Public Economy, Finance, Accounting, Economic history, Regional Economics, Industrial Economics, International Economics. The Journal is included in CSSCI.
Does the rapid growth of development zones stem from short-term “false prosperity” resulting from policy rents? Can it promote the rapid growth of firms through agglomeration effect? Finding out this question is of great importance to the evaluation of the effectiveness and further improvement of development zone policy. However, existing research is vague about this question. By identifying firms in the development zones, this paper empirically tests the role of development zones in entry, exit and growth of firms as well as the sustainability of the growth effect of development zones. Then, it reveals the micro mechanisms of the effect of development zones on regional economic growth. The results of research show that: (1) Development zones attract efficient firms to enter, and reduce the exit risks of firms in development zones, thereby leading to significant increases in the net number and rate of firms entering development zones. This means that favorable policies are the important factors attracting firms to locate in development zones and the agglomeration economy in the region constantly increases. (2) The development zones have significantly improved the firm employment growth, productivity growth and sales growth, which indicates that the development zone policy and the agglomeration economy can promote the rapid growth of the firms, so as to drive regional economic growth. (3) At the beginning of the development zone, the preferential policy of subsidy and taxation brought short-term rapid growth; at the same time, the self-reinforcing agglomeration economy of the area has a long-term promotion effect on the dynamic growth of firms. This conclusion means that the growth effect of the development zones is sustainable. This paper affirms the long-term positive effect of development zones on the dynamic growth of firms. It not only provides more comprehensive understanding for the performance evaluation of development zone policies, but also offers important implications for further growth and improvement of development zones.
As currently Chinese economy has entered into the new normal, advancing the supply-front structural reform has become the main content of future economic work. Against this background, it deserves attention that how banking as the principal part of financial sectors supports the supply-front reform of the real economy, and help improve the efficiency of finance serving the real economy. This paper uses the data of Chinese industrial firms to discuss how banking industry structure promotes the increase in industry TFP. The results show that the development of small and medium-sized banks can improve the credit allocation structure, thus effectively reducing the misallocation of industry resources and increasing industry productivity. The development of small and medium-sized banks can not only raise the survival risks of zombie companies and force them to exit the market, but also alleviate credit constraints faced by efficient companies when expanding production and promote the growth of companies. Therefore, the optimization of banking market structure is beneficial to the optimal allocation of credit resources, and is of great significance to solving the problem of zombie companies and advancing the supply-front structural reform.
The Study of the influence of FDI on environmental quality against the background of openness concerns the sustainability of China’ green development. This paper introduces the endogenous environmental regulation into the theoretical model established by Copeland and Taylor. Then, it decomposes and studies the heterogeneous effects of FDI on local environmental quality. Theoretical analysis shows the following results. Firstly, the effects of FDI on local environmental quality can be decomposed into scale, structure, technology and income effects; secondly, the technology and income effects of FDI on the improvement of environmental quality are positive, and the scale and structure effects are negative; and there is theoretically a threshold value of FDI in terms of the improvement of environmental quality. Furthermore, this paper takes sulfur dioxide concentration rather than pollutant discharge commonly used in previous literature as the indicator of urban environmental quality and makes an empirical test at the prefecture level. It arrives at the following empirical results. Firstly, at present, as a whole, FDI improves environmental quality in China through scale, structure, technology and income effects; secondly, there is a threshold value in terms of the effect of FDI on environmental improvement, namely, when the proportion of FDI is more than 0. 12, FDI increase will lead to the deterioration of environmental quality. This paper provides implications for how to exert the role of FDI in environmental improvement and formulate more flexible policies of attracting investment and differentiated environmental policies.
Based on Thousands Villages Investigation of 2015 by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and from a perspective of the large concept of inclusive finance, this paper measures inclusive finance by penetration, usage and effectiveness, and takes policy support, grass-roots work and infrastructures to measure active government. Then it analyzes the effect of the active governments on inclusive finance and regional differences, and arrives at the results as follows: firstly, the development of rural inclusive finance is the best in eastern China, and the governments in western China are the most active ones; secondly, the core of inclusive finance is to improve the usage of finance services, especially the usage of banking services; thirdly, as an active government, it should be active comprehensively; fourthly, the active government can be useful to enhance the inclusive finance significantly, but government support mainly in the way of subsidies with a threshold does not always promote the development of inclusive finance and should be used cautiously; fifthly, in the development of inclusive finance, western China should increase the construction of financial infrastructures and improve the policy support, and eastern China should strengthen the work of the grassroots governments.
Based on price system determined by ecological footprint analysis and ecological service value theory, this paper calculates ecological deficits and their value, proposes environmental tax plan of value compensation, constructs green social accounting matrix and environmental tax CGE model by regarding ecological occupation as an input factor, and analyzes the environmental, employment, growth, distribution and trade effects of tax plan under 5%, 10% and 30% of compensation intensity through comparative analysis of numerical simulation. It comes to the results as follows: Firstly, the ecological deficit tax plan has a double dividend effect on the reduction in ecological occupation and employment growth; secondly, the total output and intermediate inputs decline as a whole; the nominal GDP increases and the green GDP grows faster, but the real GDP declines, indicating that tax policies can result in the rise in price indexes to a certain extent; thirdly, owing to a relatively high level of ecological deficit compensation, government tax revenues improve greatly, and their growth rate is higher than the growth rates of labor and capital factors, but the proportions of income of residents and corporate revenues decline slightly. Based on the proportions of resources related tax and environmental tax in total tax revenues, as well as the tax structures and changing trends of OECD countries, this paper finally suggests that compensation rate of the ecological deficit tax should be lower than 5%.