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.
Faced with the contradiction between institutional legitimacy and behavior effectiveness of the board of directors of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during the current reform, this paper analyzes the dualism and coupling mechanism of internal economic power and administrative power of the SOE board. Against the macro background of Chinese SOEs’ corporate governance transformation, we further constructed the internal power distribution and evolution path of the board of directors. This paper points out that the SOE board can distribute the internal power structure effectively by coordinating and optimizing the sources of directors, transform from “administration-determined” to “administration-embedded” and “administration-supervised,” and then construct internal power distribution mode of the SOE board according to the Chinese corporate governance situation. Based on the empirical data of Chinese state-owned listed companies from 2012 to 2014, this paper finds such problems as “decision making by top leader, serious administrative management and weak independence” within the SOE board. Government’s administrative interference may have negative effect on the corporate operation and development to some extent. Meanwhile, too much dependence on economic power of the board will lead to “insider control” and other problems. A significant “U-shaped” relationship exists between the proportion of economic directors and corporate performance. Proportion of state-owned shares has certain moderating effect on the power distribution mode of the board. As a countermeasure, this paper makes targeted analysis on different SOE board power distribution modes, further interprets the “de-administration,” suggests the new problems against the future SOE board power distribution, and explores the reform direction for targeted governance.
This paper studied gender discrimination in hiring markets by sending 19,130 matched resumes in response to professional employment advertisements posted on major Internet employment boards in China for positions such as engineers, accountants, secretaries and marketing positions in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Chengdu. The results were as the follows. In contrast to developed countries, employers in hiring markets for mid-to-high end positions in China generally preferred female applicants, which could be related to the high labor participation rate of Chinese female workers. With respect to ownership of enterprises, foreign and private enterprises tended to prefer female applicants. State-owned enterprises have no significant gender preference, and state-owned enterprises do not prefer female applicants in the positions with female preference in other types of enterprises. On one hand, this supported the hypothesis that economic reforms and the market economy might mitigate gender discrimination. On the other hand, this was consistent with statistics that described discrimination based on gender segregation and information asymmetry that originated with high ratios of female workers in foreign-funded and private firms. With respect to regional pay disparity, we found that the differences in gender discrimination between the first-tier and the second-tier cities were not significant. We also found that the gender ratios of births in the six cities had nothing to do with the distribution of gender discrimination, indicating no taste discrimination based on traditional son preference in China. This paper is the first attempt to implement the correspondence study to investigate gender discrimination in Chinese hiring markets, and to summarize and explain the characteristics of the market.
Horizontal sprawl and spatial multi-center agglomeration are two patterns of urban spatial expansion, and it is meaningful to evaluate how they affect urban productivity in order to promote more efficient land-use in the process of new-type urbanization in China. The existing literature only analyzed the impact of sprawl on urban productivity and considered that it negatively affects productivity. This paper argued that modern urban expansion is not only the former pattern that the single residential sector gradually sprawls outward city center, but the latter one of multi-center agglomeration that service sector clusters in city center and manufacturing sector agglomerates in peripheral sub-centers. The new expansive pattern produces positive agglomeration effects without significant effects on commuting cost, therefore it could improve productivity. Based on data in the period from 1997 to 2013 of 286 Chinese prefecture-level cities, the empirical results showed that multi-center agglomeration significantly improves urban productivity through the effects of manufacturing sector clustering in sub-centers and its interaction with producer services, while sprawl has no evident impact. The results also demonstrated that the effects of multi-center agglomeration vary under different circumstances. It is significant in the period of 2003–2011, which is the speeding-up stage of urban expansion; it significantly promotes productivity for those cities transited from mono-center to multi-center while having no sign for those too large cities. Therefore, the key factor of maintaining high economic efficiency in the process of urban expansion is multi-center agglomeration instead of horizontal sprawl.
Under the condition of Internet entrepreneurship, in many cases, entrepreneurs have gained advantages through their “friend network.” At the same time, however, other entrepreneurs with high-level social network went through failure. The above phenomenon cannot be explained only by social embeddedness theory on the role of entrepreneurial social network. Internet entrepreneurship poses new challenges to the existing management research related to entrepreneurial social network. We use data mining technology to generate a cross-section database, fit the social identity theory into the social embeddedness theoretical framework, introduce a new variable of in-group conditions besides the variable of network features, and conduct empirical study on the influence of social network on Internet entrepreneurship. We have found that the process that entrepreneurial social network level improves entrepreneurial performance is influenced by entrepreneurial in-group conditions. This effectively explains why entrepreneurial projects’ performance differs in similar “friend network,” and opens a theoretical “black box” of the existing research that failed to reveal the influence of entrepreneurial performance caused by the difference between entrepreneurs and their social network members. Based on entrepreneurial social network features and in-group conditions, we propose a 2 × 2 matrix of entrepreneurial performance and provide the following suggestions. Entrepreneurs should promote balance between social network features (including education level and entrepreneurial experience) and in-group conditions, and achieve in-group identity while improving social network features.
In recent years, Western countries and China have proposed the “re-industrialization” strategy and “Made in China 2025” strategy, which put forward higher requirements on the interaction of manufacturing and producer services. Especially, driven by the “Internet +”, the interaction between manufacturing and producer services has showed a totally different development model. This paper builds a theoretical analytical framework of “internet drive - demand ecosystem - manufacturing ecosystem - service ecosystem” based on urban agglomerations. The empirical study is taken by using data of prefecture-level and county-level cities in Yangtze River Delta during 1994–2014. The results show that, driven by the Internet, manufacturing and producer services will performance the “crowding out effect” because of competition for overlapping resources, and thus lead to the formation of the spatial non-integration. Overall, the Internet can promote the spatial non-integration of manufacturing and producer services. The role is evident after 2008, but this effect shows industry heterogeneity. Some sectors in service sectors and manufacturing are more suitable for spatial integrated development. The spatial boundary scope of the spatial non-integration of manufacturing and producer services will transform from 80–200 kilometers in the age of industrial economy to spatial boundary uncertainty in the age of Internet. Under the effect of the geography rent, connection rent and network rent alternately, the spatial non-integration of manufacturing and producer services goes through three stages, including spatial differentiation, spatial self-selection and spatial network, and Yangtze River Delta is going through transitional stage from spatial self–selection to spatial network.
This paper first, in theory, explores the causes of embedding effects among multiple environmental policies on the basis of an extended health production function. And then taking haze and sand control policies in Beijing as example, we design a sub sample choice experiment in order to verify embedding effects. Random parameter Logit model is adopted to conduct the estimation, and we simulate 2000 marginal values according to the estimates in each sub sample. Results of mean tests confirm the significant and steady embedding effects, and if the effect is ignored, marginal values of reducing haze and sand would be overestimated by 36.87% and 67.62%, respectively. The results indicate that before conducting cost and benefit analysis of an environmental policy, the policy makers or researchers should carefully examine the possible embedding effects in multiple policies, especially those targeting different pollutants but economic values of the pollutants are correlated or integrated.
Maintaining a stable growth at the background of deleverage has posed new challenges to Chinese fiscal policy. This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating different degrees of capital intensity, vertical industrial linkage and limited competitive financial market to study the effects of Chinese fiscal policy. This paper finds that expansion of government productive spending can promote the leverage of state-owned enterprises, while the leverage of private-owned enterprises will decrease significantly at first and then rise slightly. Expansion of government security spending will cause the leverage of private-owned enterprises rise rapidly, and the leverage of state-owned enterprises rise modestly. The leverage of state-owned enterprises is relatively high, while the leverage of private-owned enterprises is relatively low, and the investment demand of the latter is fragile at present. Increasing the leverage and investment of private-owned enterprises can increase capacity utilization of state-owned enterprises and will not cause a significant increase in the leverage of state-owned enterprises. Rise in capacity utilization will increase leverage utilization of state-owned enterprises and reduce the risk of default. In order to reach the goal of deleverage and maintaining a stable growth at the background of Supply-side Structural Reforms, the government should control and reduce the leverage of state-owned enterprises, optimize the structure of fiscal expenditure and implement fiscal expansion policy with security spending as the core.
Based on the balanced panel data of 31 provincial areas in China over the period from 2002 to 2012, this paper conducts a study by using a spatial autoregressive model (SAR) concerning the intra- and inter-regional impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic entrepreneurship. Results show that entrepreneurship between the provincial areas has positive spatial correlation, and intra-regional FDI’s direct effect, inter-regional FDI’s indirect effect and the total effect influence intra-regional entrepreneurship with inverted U-shaped curvilinear effects. Furthermore, intra-regional FDI’s direct effect is greater than inter-regional FDI’s indirect effect, which indicates features of localization. Furthermore, this paper finds that the inverted U-shaped curvilinear effects between FDI and entrepreneurship rely on the technological level, foreign investment rate, spending on science and technology, and wage level, which explains the effect difference among provincial areas. Therefore, in underdeveloped provincial areas like Gansu and Heilongjiang, the amount of FDI is far from the threshold, which implies it is still urgent for these provincial areas to introduce more FDI. However, in developed provincial areas such as Beijing and Shanghai, the amount of FDI is close to the threshold and FDI’s spillover effect is constrained. Hence, these provincial areas should pay more attention to the quality of FDI and take full advantage of the institutional environment to motivate entrepreneurship by streamlining administration and delegating power to the lower levels. In addition, it is imperative to implement the policy of making neighborhood rich by encouraging active entrepreneurial regions to drive inactive ones, which is an effective practice of coordinated development in China.