China Industrial Economics is supervised by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and sponsored by Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It aims to report researches on industrial economics and business management, and to reflect outstanding research results on Chinese industrial economy and enterprise development. The scope covers national economy, industrial economy and business management. The journal is included in CSSCI, and is the top journal in the field of industrial economics in China.
The transfer of local officials usually reshuffles the relationship between government and enterprises. Choosing the listed SOEs in China’s stock markets of Shenzhen and Shanghai during 2006 and 2012 as a study sample, we selected the reconstruction of government-business relations as the new angle of view and empirically studied the impact of local officials’ turnover on SOE executives’ abnormal changes, and we analyzed this influence in detail from the dimensions of industries and the last job locations of the new officials. The result showed that the probability of executives’ changes would increase after local officials’ turnover for those SOEs that were directed controlled by municipal people’s government. By further testing, we found that this influence only existed in the real estate industry and the manufacturing industry, and new officials came from another municipality showed lower influence on SOE executives’ changes compared to those new officials from local political system. After a further examination, we found a decreasing market performance in manufacture firms while an increasing market performance in real estate firms after executives’ changes caused by political turnover. Our study not only enriches the research on political uncertainty and corporate governance, but also offers an empirical support to understand how political power intervene in market operation, and provides an new reference to political decision-makers to understand the relationship between government and enterprises, and then helps them to introduce some relevant laws or regulations.
Since the 1980s, the division of labor has deepened from horizontal division, which is inter-product division, to vertical specialization based on the value chain which is intra-product division. The enterprise that participated in intra-product division would carry out asset-heavy operation if it is specialized in the manufacturing process of the value chain, and it is asset-light operation when specialized in research and marketing of the value chain. In the competitive equilibrium, an enterprise’s excess profits come from exclusive resources. While outsourcing manufacturing operation does not form exclusive resources, hence the asset-light operation alone will not result in excess profit. Empirically, this article gathers data on Chinese industrial enterprises from 1999 to 2007 and constructs the asset-light measure variables by employing indicators such as ratio of fixed assets and ratio of sales expenses to study the effect of asset-light operation on profit margin through panel data model. No evidence was found to support that “asset-light firms yield higher profit margin,” which implies that enterprises should decide whether to participate in the division of labor in the value chain according to the principle of cost minimization. Enterprises should decide which link of value chain shall be specialized according to their competitive advantages and gradually accumulate exclusive resources and core competitiveness through “learning by doing,” instead of pursuing merely asset-light operation in the financial statements.
Land finance is the most important issue in China during the last decade; one explanation is that the local governments are pushed to sell the land because they have great fiscal pressure. This paper uses the natural experiment of newly appointed minister in China between 1998 and 2007 to test the hypothesis, we get several finds. Firstly, newly elected ministers significantly reduce the fiscal pressure of their hometown, those ministers will change the distribution of fiscal transfers and increase transfer payment by 12% for their hometown. Secondly, the reductions of fiscal pressure of ministers’ hometown have no impact on the land finance behavior, the area and revenue of land sales have not changed. Thirdly, the real cause of land finance is the impulse to invest, even the transfer payment is used for productive infrastructure but not the basic public service. The policy implications of this paper are that the future reform should focus on the land financial policy, while decentralization is not a feasible way because the fiscal pressure is not the real cause of land finance.
Abstract Based on the modified input-output model and the biproportional scaling method (RAS), this study quantitatively calculates direct and total industrial carbon emissions, carbon emissions across sectors and carbon emissions embodied in import and export of 23 industrial sectors in China, by using input-output table and energy consumption data. The results show that: first, more than 84% energy-related carbon emissions are contributed by industrial sectors. Carbon intensity abatement and total emissions reduction in the key sectors are relatively consistent. Second, induced carbon emissions are much higher than direct carbon emissions in most industrial sectors. It indicates that carbon emissions across industrial sectors are the main part of the total carbon emission of the industrial sectors. Therefore, the different industrial sectors are responsible jointly for carbon emission reduction. The 23 industrial sectors are divided into five apparent-type ones, five transmission-type ones and six whole-process-type ones; all types of sectors with high carbon emissions should take classification management strategy. Fourth, from the perspective of supply direction, carbon emissions transferring across the industrial sectors are mainly along the energy sector-extractive industry-process manufacturing-discrete manufacturing. By selecting key transferring pathways, we can get some carbon emission reduction sector groups with a priority to promote. Fifth, about 4.09% of domestic industrial carbon emissions are reduced through the embodied carbon transferring in the input and output trade. Optimizing foreign trade structure is good for domestic carbon reduction. Sixth, this study assumed the technical and economic relations among sectors change smoothly, based on the planning data, compared with 2010, average intensity of total industrial carbon emissions will decrease by 40% in 2017, whereas the total industrial carbon emissions may continue to increase. Especially, some sectors, such as manufacturing of transport equipment, need to be interposed emphatically.
The deep-rooted difficulties and challenges that Chinese manufacturing industries are likely to confront require China to build its core competencies on its unique industrial bases, human resources, market demand, and cultural characteristic and improve these competences continuously. Comparative analyses and historical research reveal consistently that every advanced industrialized country possesses core technical competencies that are difficult to imitate and to diffuse. In addition, institutional arrangements that help to turn a latecomer into a strong industrial country should always fit the core technical competences of its manufacturing sectors. These appropriate institutional arrangements are characterized by homogeneity among advanced industrial countries，as well as by path dependency and heterogeneity rooted in unique competences of a particular country. Yet, organizational capabilities of an advanced industrial country, which interact with technical capabilities and enhance each other mutually in a co-evolutionary process featured by strategic complements, consists only of heterogeneous rather than homogeneous institutional arrangements. Compared with the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and other advanced industrial countries, the advantages of Chinese manufacturing industries lie mainly in the manufacturing of modular products and large complex equipment while the disadvantages lie in the fields of product architectural integration, manufacturing technique integration, and core components requiring both integration and cutting-edge technologies. There are two potential avenues to enhance the core competences of Chinese manufacturing industries. The first is to strengthen the capabilities of turning integrated products into modular products through architectural innovation and standard creation. The second is to make the most of the mismatch between foreign technologies and China’s local market and to enhance the capabilities of architectural innovation and integration in the field of complicated equipment. From this perspective, Made in China 2025 in essence provides only stronger conventional industrial policies but no answers to a more foundational question: where Chinese manufacturing industries should go.
Assessing foreign and domestic value added in manufacturing export is a key problem in the assessment of a country’s trade interests in the global value chain. Since the traditional HIY method overestimates domestic value added of export, Koopman calculation method makes corresponding improvement; however, under the condition of incomplete information, failure to use the traditional I/O matrix and the direct input coefficient matrix makes its application limited. In this paper, the GAMS model is constructed to solve the above problem, and this paper use this improved model to measure the changes of foreign and domestic value added in China’s export during 2002 to 2012. The results show that the HIY evaluation method ignored the export of processing trade, therefore overestimating the domestic value added rate of Chinese export. Due to the use of more import intermediate inputs in export processing trade, the calculated result in this paper correct the errors in foreign value added rate and trend prediction by the HIY method. By further studying related influencing factors of domestic export value added, it is found that the value added of export processing trade and mixed trade are highly susceptible to the influence of international capital inflows. As a result, the improved measurement of value added has corrected errors in the measurement of China’s value added. We should speed up the development of non-export processing trade, introduce high-end service trade, and make good use of the relationship between foreign and domestic enterprise export to improve foreign trade dependence, raise the trade status of China’s manufacturing enterprises in the global value chain.
This paper theoretically proves that industrial restructuring can realize the carbon reduction objective under the premises of keeping economic growth rate and technical progressing rate constant. As a case, this paper estimates the economic linkages and carbon emissions linkages of 28 industries in Guangdong based on the input-output model, and selects four industries of constrained development and 11 industries of encouraged development according to the differences between the two linkages. On such basis, three scenarios are set using multi-objective programming model. According to the gradual incremental order within the fluctuation range of input and end use minus the inflow, this paper simulates the way to achieve the objective of higher GDP growth, energy consumption and further reduction of carbon emissions through the adjustment of industrial structure in the Guangdong Province provided that the inputs were kept constant in 2012. The studies find the following results. ① The economic linkage and carbon emissions linkage among the industries are different, thus providing the possibility for selecting the industries of encouraged development or constrained development. ② The expected added values of the primary and secondary industries are increased but the expected proportions are decreased. The expected added value of the service industry and the expected proportion increased. The simulation results can increase the expected GDP and reduce the expected carbon emissions to a certain extent. ③ The proportion of added value of industries that do not need to be constrained or even need to be encouraged is declining. The proportion of added value of industries that do not need to be encouraged is rising, but the industries that need to be encouraged and constrained development have reached the objective of structural adjustment. ④ The increased efforts in adjustment of industrial structure will help reduce carbon emission while promoting economic growth to achieve the win-win situation of guaranteeing economic growth and adjusting economic structure simultaneously.
