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.
Accumulation of human capital is an important source of China’s economic growth. With the rapid growth of China in the past, what impact has the structure of employment skills had on the human capital investment? This paper constructs a theoretical model to elaborate the mechanism that the demand for employment skills will affect human capital investment. Then, it uses the data of Chinese industrial enterprises and the China Urban Household Survey data from 2002 to 2012 to examine the effect of the structure of employment skills on the human capital investment of household. It finds out that the more local employment is biased toward high skills, the more the household will invest in human capital. On the contrary, the more local employment is biased toward low skills, the less the household will invest in human capital. After using instrumental variables to solve endogenous problems, the above conclusions are still valid. This shows that decisions of households on human capital investment are significantly affected by the local labor market, especially for the human capital measured by the expenditure on education and college enrollment probability of school-age adolescents. This paper is helpful to understand the evolution of China’s structure of employment skills, and the mechanisms and effects of the impact that the structure of employment skills have on human capital investment.
The control rule for government debt and the financial risk are often ignored in the existing DSGE models. Based on the classical NK-DSGE model, this paper incorporates fiscal pressure and fiscal consolidation into the financial system, and discusses the macro effect of economic policy through a DSGE model. Further, this paper discusses the optimal policy under different government macro management objectives. It is found in this paper that, firstly, China’s expansionary fiscal expenditure has a remarkable effect of counter-cyclical regulation. However, the increase of government debt scale not only leads to the reduction of fiscal space, but also inhibits the effectiveness of the fiscal reverse cycle policy, and will also affect the pricing mechanism of the financial market. Secondly, the rules of fiscal consolidation have negative effects of weakening expansionary fiscal expenditure, and enhance the economic effect of fiscal policy’s counter-cyclical regulation. Thirdly, the mix of macro-prudential policy and fiscal consolidation not only inherits the advantages of the original macro-prudential policy, but also makes full use of the economic cyclical uplink, reduces the scale of government debt, ensures that the deficit and debt enter a stable downward channel and reserve fiscal space. Fourthly, the mix of macro-prudential policy and fiscal consolidation is better than macro-prudential policy. That indicates that it may not be enough to rely solely on macro-prudential policy tools to solve financial instability. Finally, the extended macro-prudential policy with fiscal consolidation will eliminate or weaken economic frictions or economic distortions. It will make the economy achieve an effective balance, and fundamentally improve social welfare.
In recent years, how to effectively improve total factor productivity (TFP) to promote high-quality economic development has become the focus of attention of all sectors of society. This paper regards China’s Revitalization Plan of Ten Industries in 2009 as a natural experiment and examines the impact of selective industrial policies on the TFP of enterprise with DID method. The empirical results show that: compared with the control group, the shock of the Revitalization Plan of Ten Industries has led to a significant decline in the TFP of the enterprises in the experimental group. And it is consistent with the economic intuition that selective industrial policies mainly function through direct government intervention. The grouping test based on the perspective of region and ownership shows: ① Compared with regions with weak government intervention, enterprises in regions with strong government intervention tend to be more affected by industrial policies; ② compared with non-state-owned enterprises, state-owned enterprises tend to be more affected by industrial policies. Further research shows that compared with the control group, the impact of industrial policies leads to the reduction of sensitivity of experimental group’s investment to investment opportunities, and this effect is more significant for regions and state-owned enterprises with strong local government intervention. This reveals that the promulgation of the Revitalization Plan of Ten Industries has affected the TFP of enterprises through the channel of capital allocation efficiency. This paper not only identifies the causal relationship between the promulgation of Revitalization Plan of Ten Industries and TFP, which can help to clarify the mechanism of industrial policies leading to actual economic effects, and has important enlightenment significance for further straightening out the relationship between the government and the market to promote the improvement of TFP of enterprises and high-quality economic development.
The interactive development between urban and development zone is an important feature of China’s regional economic development. Most of the existing literature focuses on one aspect of this interactive pattern of how the establishment and development of development zones affect the growth of urban areas. Unlike that literature, this paper focuses on how urban population density affects the firms’ productivity of development zone. Based on the theory of spatial equilibrium and local labor market, we propose a hypothesis that the impact of urban population density on firms’ productivity of development zones is a U-shaped trend. Using firms’ panel data of China national economic and technical development zones during 2003–2007, our empirical results confirm this hypothesis well. When urban population density is less than 8800 people/ km
2, there is a competitive relationship between urban areas and the development zone. Urban population density has a negative effect on the firms’ productivity of development zone. When urban population density exceeds 8800 people/km
2, the relationship between urban areas and development zone converts to cooperation, urban population density has a positive effect on the firm’s productivity of development zone. Further results show that matching between firm and labor, and attracting new entry brought by the thick labor market are the main mechanisms for urban population density affecting firms productivity in the development zone; the urban spillover effects only exist in the eastern region of China, labor-intensive industries and firms with less than 100 employees. To obtain this spillover effect, a new firm needs to spend three years to learn after it enters the development zone. The conclusion of this paper shows that the coordinated development between urban and development zone depends on urban population density.
In the theoretical study, this paper introduced the e-commerce platform into the trade theory model of multi-destination, multi-product heterogeneous firms, and analyzed the impact of application of e-commerce platform on enterprises’ export. In the empirical study, this paper used the data of paid membership of Alibaba China from 2000 to 2009, the data of Chinese industrial enterprises and the China Customs data to test the conclusion of the theoretical model with the PSM-DID method. The results show that the e-commerce platform significantly improves the probability of enterprises entering the export market and promotes the expansion of export volume of enterprises. From the view of the growth structure, the growth of export volume is mainly due to the increase of the country-level and product-level extensive margin. The e-commerce platform makes enterprises export more to developed countries and long-distance countries, which responds to the puzzle of the distance effect at the enterprise level. The mechanism analysis shows that the e-commerce platform promotes export mainly through three ways: improving production efficiency, enhancing trade matching efficiency and reducing export threshold. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the e-commerce platform has a more significant impact on SMEs, enterprises in developed area and enterprises with general trade exports. This paper systematically examines the impact of e-commerce platform on the enterprises’ export through theoretical and empirical study, which provides useful inspiration for the digital economy that the government has been advocating in recent years.
Export complexity is an important factor influencing export volatility. Based on the modular perspective and the method of reflections, this paper first portrays the index of export unique selection degree and the index of intra-product complexity to comprehensively measure China’s firm-level export complexity from both intra-product and inter-product dimensions. Using the indexes above, we study the influence of export complexity on export volatility and provide a micro-level explanation for China’s export volatility from the supply side. We find that with a 1% increase of unique selection degree and product complexity degree, the export volatility can increase by 0.037% and 0.023% separately. Then we decompose export volatility into two parts, namely the firm-specific heterogeneity volatility and the sector- and destination policy-induced volatility, and find that the increase of unique selection degree will increase both types of volatility, while product complexity can cause the increase of sector- and destination policy-induced volatility and the decrease of firm-specific heterogeneity volatility. The above conclusions remain robust after we control demand factors and endogeneity problems. Therefore, one possible explanation for the rise of firm export volatility is the rise of unique selection or product complexity degree, which can help us correctly handle the situation of rising export volatility in firms.
