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.
In the context of the wave of anti-globalization, the rise of trade protectionism, and the trade friction between China and US, could China employ internal reform, such as fiscal and tax policy, to achieve the upgrading of firm export? Or rather, could tax relief provide Chinese firms a key taxation-driving force for improving export? The discussion on this issue is of great practical significance. In view of this, based on the data of the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey 2005 on China, supplemented by the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey 2012 on China, this paper made the first attempt to systematically explore the impact of tax burden on firms’ export. Our main finding is that tax burden has a negative impact on firms’ export propensity, export scale, and export intensity. Furthermore, the negative impact mainly comes from value-added tax (VAT) burden. The innovation and contribution of this paper are as follows. Firstly, this is the first paper to directly explore the impacts of different kinds of tax burden on firms’ export based on the data of the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey 2005 on China and the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey 2012 on China, which provides the micro evidence for verifying the substantial effect of tax burden on firms’ export. Secondly, this paper compares the impacts of the burden of turnover tax (indirect tax) burden and income tax (direct tax) on firms’ export, and finds that the negative impact mainly comes from turnover tax (indirect tax), which indicates that the tax structure biased toward direct tax is a better tax arrangement for export firms under the premise that the general target of taxation is determined. The Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th National Congress of the CPC clearly put forward: “We will deepen the reform of the taxation system, improve the local tax system, and gradually increase the proportion of direct tax.” This paper provides empirical evidence for the rationality and necessity of this reform from the perspective of stabling foreign trade. Thirdly, to get to the origins of the negative impact, this paper inquisitively explores which kind of turnover tax (indirect tax) burden has a substantial effect on firms’ export by comparing the impacts of VAT burden, business tax burden and consumption tax burden, and finally finds that VAT burden has the strongest negative impact on firms’ export, followed by business tax burden and consumption tax burden. Or rather, the negative impact of turnover tax burden on firms’ export mainly comes from VAT burden. Fourthly, this paper supplements the empirical study on firms’ export mode by comparing the impacts of tax burden on firms’ direct export and firms’ indirect export, and finds that tax burden mainly affects indirect export. Fifthly, this paper makes the first attempt to explore the channels through which tax burden affects firms’ export in detail, and thus systematically gives an answer to the question that how tax burden affects firms’ export.
The construction of Chinese economics began in early modern times. Some scholars discussed its system construction then, however, the current academic circle has not paid enough attention to this field. For the first time, this paper systematically investigated the exploration and construction of the research content of Chinese economics in early modern times. By focusing on the achievements which have theoretical consciousness and are in line with the understanding of Chinese economics at that time, this paper mined the first-hand literature in-depth. It classified them into four categories, namely, those with several theoretical and practical issues as the main components, those with philosophy-theory-policy as the main components, those referring to
Das Kapital system as the main component, and those referring to the method of quartering in classical economics as the main component. Based on this classification, this paper analyzed opinions put forward by scholars with different theoretical backgrounds from the late 1920s to the 1940s. This paper mainly drew the following conclusions. First, a basic framework for the research content of Chinese economics has been established in the early modern context through such exploration, covering a series of economic issues which include the historical evolution of Chinese economy, the nature of Chinese society, the operation of China’s economy, China’s production relations, industrialization and rural economy construction, fiscal and financial reforms. Second, an important logic on system construction embodied in this process is that based on absorbing the existing economic theories, the key point is to deeply explore the unique problems in the historical context of China’s economy and society transforming from traditional to modern ones. Third, the early modern exploration failed to build a recognized mode of the research content which could be followed. The direct reason is that there was a lack of theoretical abstraction and refinement of the economic issues. The fundamental reason is that early modern China was short of a social background of basic stability and owned a backward economic research level. All these kept it away from the establishment of a mature and systematical economics. The academic value of this paper could be concluded in three aspects. First, it proposes a research framework based on system construction, especially on the research content, and forms a new perspective to integrate the works of early modern Chinese economics. Second, it excavates a series of first-hand historical documents, thus expanding the literature in this field. Third, it systematically shows the achievements and progress of early modern Chinese economics on the research content, and provides implications for accelerating the construction of the socialist political economics with Chinese characteristics.
As a public health emergency, Covid-19 has a major and far-reaching impact on China and the world, testing the public policies and governance capacities of each country. The medical research and vaccine development cycle of Covid-19 is relatively long. Therefore, timely and effective identification and separation of Covid-19 cases through information technology has become a key task for epidemic prevention and control. The informatization of government affairs (that is, e-government) has always been an important tool for the Chinese government to improve its governance capacity, which has laid a solid foundation for the response to the epidemic. Through the government information system, cases and close contacts can be detected, tracked and isolated in a timely manner, and transmission routes can be blocked, which provides strong support for the control of the disorderly spread of the epidemic and the timely treatment of patients. Meanwhile, the implementation effect of e-government is also affected by social credit. Although local governments have set up elaborate government information systems based on big data, it is still difficult to accurately cover everyone. Therefore, the control of people can only be based on abstract information, but the accuracy of information and the execution of policies all depend on people’s credit level. Based on this quasi-natural experiment, the e-government level of 286 cities on pandemic prevention and control was tested. In addition, the fulfillment rate of Ctrip’s room reservation in December 2019 was used to represent the social credit level of each city, and the interaction effect of social credit on e-government was tested. The findings are as follows. (1) In general, e-government can improve the public policy efficiency of pandemic prevention and control. For every 0.1 increase in the e-government level, the number of confirmed cases will be reduced by 65.6, and the number of deaths per 10,000 people will be reduced by 0.008. (2) The role of e-government in pandemic prevention and control depends on the local social credit level to a certain extent. (3) The registration of population information at the community level plays a prominent role during the control of pandemic. Using the number of post offices in each city and the revenue from telecommunication services as the instrumental variables of e-government, using the digital index compiled by Tencent as a proxy variable, and controlling the personal characteristics of the Party secretary, the number of employees in the public sector and city level, the basic conclusion remains stable. The findings provide some policy implications to strengthen governance and improve the efficiency of regular epidemic prevention and control.
In China, the information disclosure of charity organizations lags behind. Due to the lack of transparency, the negative news about the source and destination of charity funds has been frequently reported. The root of the trust crisis lies in the lack of effective information disclosure mechanism of charity organizations, which has become a stumbling block to the long-term healthy development of charity organizations. During this outbreak, the information disclosure of charity organizations has become a social focus in the fight against the virus. It can be seen that the public crisis not only causes casualties and serious ecological damage, but also causes the charity organizations involved to bear a lot of reputational costs. The query on the information disclosure of charity organizations during this epidemic could promote China’s implementation of the government accounting system reform and bring constructive suggestions. The epidemic presents an excellent opportunity to study the information disclosure of non-profit organizations under public pressure. This study provides empirical evidence for promoting the implementation of Accounting System of Non-profit Organizations and even Charity Law in China, and emphasizes the importance of central and local governments on anticorruption work during the epidemic. The occurrence, spread and suppression of the epidemic is a typical natural experiment, which is periodic and unpredictable. The call of the central government will be the political guarantee for non-profit organizations to seize this opportunity. This paper collected the disclosure information of China Charity Federation and Red Cross Society of China, and then empirically tested the development influence of public crisis on the charity information disclosure and its mechanism of action. It is found that the epidemic can promote information disclosure; the supervision effect of public opinion pressure from media and the deterrent effect of anti-epidemic official turnover jointly play the regulatory role of external governance. Further analysis shows that after the query of Han Hong Foundation, the impact of epidemic development on the information disclosure of charity organizations is more significant. We conducted at least four robustness tests, and our main empirical findings are stable. This paper enriches the existing literature from the following three aspects. (1) It expands the research on the influencing factors of information disclosure of charity organizations, and deepens the understanding of the law of information disclosure of charity organizations. The existing studies mainly discussed the organizational characteristics of charity organizations and councils from the perspective of information suppliers to study the influencing factors of information disclosure of charity organizations. This paper examines the demands of information demanders from the development process of public crisis, expands the cognition of influencing factors of information disclosure of charity organizations, and makes up for the lack of information supply perspective. (2) It expands the research on the supervision effect of media reports and the deterrent effect of official turnover. The existing studies have proved that the pressure of public opinion in media reports plays an important role. The findings of this paper prove that in the special situation of public crisis events, media reports and official turnover can significantly improve the response level of charity organizations to social information needs. (3) It expands the policy research on the restoration of social and economic order after the public crisis. The findings of this study show that the public crisis can promote the information disclosure of charity organizations, and has the policy reference significance for Covid-19 epidemic prevention and control.
