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.
In recent years, the scale of service industry has been continuously increasing, the share of which in the national economy has exceeded 50%, and the proportion of the producer service sector is close to one third. With the arrival of the post-industrial period, the proportion of the service industry and producer service will continue to rise. Therefore, in the new normal, as the mainstay of the national economy, the fact that whether the development of service industry can support the rapid growth of China’s economy has drawn much attention. Based on the dynamic mechanism of economic growth, this paper calculates and decomposes the total factor productivity growth rate (TFP index), in order to explore the impact of technological progress and industrial structure transformation on overall macroeconomic productivity and macroeconomic growth, by which to prove the significance of producer service sector as the new momentum of China’s economic growth in the future. The results show that due to the higher level of technological progress and the strong gathering of capital and labor, the producer service sector could enhance the overall macroeconomic total factor productivity, and then promote the sustainable growth and high-quality development of national economy, so it can well be the new momentum for the high-quality growth of the Chinese economy under the New Normal.
Based on the hot topic of the virtualization of current real economy, this paper investigates the influence of financialization on future core performance for entity enterprises. Theoretically, there exists two kinds of effect on entity enterprises, one is “reservoir” effect, and the other one is “crowding out” effect. The net effect of financialization on core business for entity enterprises is determined by relative magnitude between “reservoir” effect and “crowding out” effect. We use data of listed companies between 2008 and 2014 in China, and use the company’s balance sheet data to construct micro financialization indexes. We find that financialization of entity enterprises damages the future core performance, and reveals that the magnitude of “crowding out” effect is larger than the magnitude of “reservoir” effect. Furthermore, the effect of financialization is stronger during the period of loose monetary policy, and the financial ecological environment weakens the negative effect of financialization on the future core performance. The path test shows that financial asset does not play a role of “reservoir” to ease future under-investment. On the contrary, we find that financialization crowds out innovation output and physical investment. Meanwhile, the decrease of innovation output and physical investment is the intermediary factor that financialization exerts influence on the future core performance. Finally, we find that the negative effect of financialization is larger in SOEs, compared to Non-SOEs. This study provides empirical evidence for influence of financialization on the real economy at the micro level, and also provides some reference for guiding funds to real economy.
Armed with the longitudinal data from China Health and Nutrition Survey, this paper examines the causal relationship between the roll-out of the New Rural Co-operative Medical Scheme (NCMS) and health inequalities among children in rural China. Although health condition of the covered children has been improved, the NCMS is still a source of the rise of health inequalities among children measured by the concentration index, and its contribution increases as time goes by. Evidence about the inequity in health service delivery shows that the probability for
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4 of the richest having access to preventive health care is 40% higher than that for
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4 of the poorest, to which the NCMS contributes about 18%. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show that increment of health care consumption increases with wealth, indicating that the wealth effect is magnified by the NCMS. Our research provides some evidence for the phenomenon that the NCMS increases the gap among children’s health and suggests improving NCMS so as to prevent it from enlarging health inequalities among people of different incomes.
Under the Internet economy, the virtual transformation has made the development of industry clusters directly beyond the border constraints of geographical space. A cluster can accommodate firms from all parts of the world without limit of number and size. The global nature of virtual industry cluster (VIC) and the scattered distribution of firms in the cluster directly change the definition of industry cluster by the traditional theory on basis of geographical space. The traditional theory holds that “external economies of scale” is the direct advantage created by industry clusters. Based on labor division theory and transaction cost theory, this paper pointed out that labor division rather than industry cluster provides such advantages. The fundamental strength of industry clusters lies in effectively narrowing the “distance,” reducing the cost of cooperation among participants, and then deepening labor division among participants; and the distance discussed here contains two meanings: “spatial distance” and “psychological distance.” The results of this research show that the virtual transformation can help the industry cluster narrow the distance among firms to zero by utilizing modern information technology; and the virtual cluster can effectively narrow the psychological distance among main actors through community operation and integration advantages of formal and informal institutions in the community. The virtual transformation has fundamentally changed the formation and evolution of industry clusters. The “quantity concentration-quality improvement-R&D and brand innovation dominating” traditional industry cluster (TIC) evolution path is replaced for the “platform drive-community operation-borderless development” evolution path of industry cluster. Virtual transformation turns industry clusters into “firms,” then “communities,” and experiment base for finding effective “organization institutions,” where organization form, operation mechanism, size, and ability all achieve borderless development.
Whether the market approach represented by venture capital (VC) can effectively stimulate the innovation of new energy companies or not is of great significance for changing the development mode of China’s new energy industry, building a low-carbon, safe energy sector and market-oriented system for green technology innovation, and promoting green development. Against the specific background that the gap of government subsidies for new energy industry expands year by year, this paper takes the inherent influence mechanism of VC on innovation capability of new energy companies into consideration and explores the effect of heterogeneity of new energy companies on the effect of VC from the perspective of absorptive capacity. As shown in the result, VC, as a market-oriented capital operation, plays an important role in the development of new energy industry, and this incentive mechanism is realized mainly through three channels together: ①“capital increasing effect” is to financially support the companies’ development directly; ②“effect of innovation tendency improvement” means to boost companies’ enthusiasm for R&D; ③“effect of shareholder activism” refers to provide companies with various forms of value-added services. Therefore, for the current situation of new energy industry, the market should play the decisive role in resource allocation so as to ensure free flows of factors in the new energy field and the survival of the fittest of the companies, achieving the goal of intensive development and structural adjustment. Besides, the government should play a better role of direct intervention in gradually reducing subsidies for new energy while creating a favorable institutional environment for the improvement of innovation capability of new energy companies through macro-regulation. The research of this paper not only offers important enlightenment for the policy formulation of China’s new energy industry, but also provides some empirical evidence for stimulating technological innovation by using market mechanism.
The term structure of credit is one of the important factors that influence the quantity of credit, but there is no sufficient research studying how interest rate instruments affect the term structure of credit in China. Different from the existing oversea research from the perspective of risk management motive, this paper, based on the special pricing mechanism of interest rate of Chinese commercial banks, built a two-stage commercial bank credit decision-making model from the perspective of profit motive and theoretically analyzed how the policy of benchmark lending rate influences the term structure of credit. It was found that the proportion of short-term loans in the commercial bank loans is positively correlated to the level of benchmark interest rate, but the level of benchmark term spread of short-term and long- and medium-term term loans may weaken the positive correlation. Meanwhile, the benchmark term spread itself may have a direct negative impact on the proportion of short-term loans. Based on the quarterly macro-data of 2005–2016, this paper adopted the TVP-FAVAR model and the time series linear regression model to support the above conclusion and verified the credibility of analyzing the transmission mechanism from the perspective of profit motive. The conclusion of this paper has some implications: the macro-control should take the micro-behavior of commercial banks into full consideration, pay attention to the control of credit resource allocation by the yield curve of credit rate, strengthen the management of the price signal of the market-oriented interest rate, and make a comprehensive use of interest rate instruments and structural monetary policy instruments.
There has been no consensus yet on whether environmental regulation brings economic dividend or hinders economic growth, that is, whether the regulatory effect should follow the “following the cost hypothesis” or the “productivity improvement hypothesis.” This paper examines the specific implementation of this mechanism by analyzing the impact of environmental regulation policy on the economic growth in China. Therefore, this paper firstly establishes a theoretical model to analyze how the regulatory policy affects the mode of regional economic growth. It selects the panel data of China’s prefectural-level cities from 1994 to 2010, uses the “two control zone” policy for a quasi-natural experiment, and adopts the DID method to assess the impact of environmental regulation on urban economic growth. The findings are as follows: Firstly, the environmental regulation has a significant promoting effect on the urban economic growth, and this role will be gradually enhanced with the implementation of the policy; secondly, the role of environmental regulation in promoting economic growth has a progressive increasing marginal effect, that is, the larger the city size is, the greater the role played by environmental regulation in promoting economic growth is. The results are still valid after a series of robustness tests. In addition, this paper discusses the micro-mechanism of environmental regulation to promote economic growth, and finds that environmental regulation does not significantly increase corporate production costs, but significantly enhances corporate productivity. Therefore, this mechanism provides a strong support for the win-win development mode of environmental regulation and economic growth. At the same time, this paper provides a new way of thinking for understanding the impact of environmental regulation on economic growth.
Confucianism is an inseparable part of Chinese traditional culture and seniority is an important component of Confucianism, which still affects individual behavior in the Chinese society subtly. Using manual data on seniority and based on the opinions of independent directors on board meetings that is unique in the Chinese stock market, this study examines the influence of seniority on independent directors’ dissenting opinions. The findings on the basis of 13,336 annual observations from the Chinese stock market from 2005 to 2013 show that seniority is significant and negatively associated with the likelihood and the number of dissenting opinions of independent directors, suggesting that seniority restrains independent directors’ dissenting opinions. In addition, the longer the CEO tenure, the more obvious the negative effect of seniority on the dissenting opinions of the independent directors, implying that the effect of seniority on independent directors’ dissenting opinions depends on the power of the CEO. This paper is the first one to measure seniority on the basis of an analysis of the ranking among independent directors in the board of directors and judge whether seniority culture exists in specific listed companies. This method will contribute to the existing literature on questionnaire survey in management. Moreover, this paper finds that the seniority in Confucianism will be detrimental to the supervising function of the independent director, which reveals the negative aspect of the Confucianism and at the same time provides practical implications for organizational culture cultivation in enterprises.
In this paper, we discussed the impact of informative content of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) on stock price crash risk by using the method of text vectorization. Using the MD&A in annual reports of China A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2015, we found that the informative content of MD&A could reduce future stock price crash risk. After further dividing MD&A into a review section and a preview section, we found that only the informative content of the preview section could significantly affect stock price crash risk. The conclusions still stood when endogeneity was controlled. We also studied the effect of textual readability and information asymmetry on the correlation between MD&A and stock price crash risk. The results showed that the higher the readability of information and the higher the degree of information asymmetry were, the more greatly the informative content of the preview section affected stock price crash risk. After redefinition of the calculation interval of stock price crash risk and control over stock price synchronicity, the informative content in the MD&A preview section still significantly affected stock price crash risk, indicating that the conclusions of this paper were robust. This paper enriches the literature on the influencing factors of stock price crash risk from the perspective of textual information, and contributes to research on the usefulness of MD&A from the perspective of incremental information, thus having important theoretical and practical significance.
