Search

This paper explores the impact of the political hierarchies of cities in China from different perspectives. First, we examine the economic disparities between prefectural cities and municipalities. Furthermore, this paper draws upon a quasi‐ experiment to analyze the impact of upgrading Chongqing to a municipality in 1997 using the synthetic control method. The city‐upgrading policy significantly increased Chongqing's gross domestic product (GDP) in the following 4 years. Finally, we find that the policy increased GDP in treated cities within 1200 km of Chongqing by about 10%–13% relative to the control cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many questions regarding local economic phenomena involve issues of spatial and temporal dependence and heterogeneity. One of the main ideas of the socialist market economic system which was set up in 1978 in China is 'those becoming rich earlier bring along other people, all achieving the common richer eventually'. However, after several decades, having performed a series of balanced development strategies and policies, is this purpose true or not? How about the outcome of regional level of planning strategies under the socialist-market system? This paper focus on the intra provincial development, and uses per capita GDP of Guangdong, one of the most developed provinces in China to analyse the economic development of prefecture-level cities from 1978 to 2013 with a new exploratory space-time method. Three conclusions can be drawn as follows: first, the degree of regional economic development is gradually deepening along with rapid economic development in Guangdong province and the per capita GDP difference is gradually widening between the Pearl River Delta region and the non-Pearl River Delta region. The core-periphery relation is clear within the provincial level's development. Second, the trend and position of space-time paths are different across regions. Third, the space-time paths have not intersected across poor and rich regions during the last 33 years. Widening uneven development is concealed by the 'fast growth' economic phenomenon. The macro-economic environment has had some effects on different regions, with the effect on fast growing areas, such as the core region of the Pearl River Delta the most obvious. There is a lag effect on other undeveloped areas. At the same time, under the socialist market economic system, the market is the main motivation behind regional discrepancies, and some policies and strategies aimed at narrowing the gap have had limited success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of Chinese activities in sub-Saharan African countries with respect to the growth performance of economies in that region. Using a Solow-type growth model and panel data for the period 1991 to 2010, we find that African economies that export natural resources have benefited from positive terms-of-trade effects. In addition, there is evidence for displacement effects of African firms due to competition from China. On the other hand, Chinese foreign investment and aid in Africa does not appear to have a significant impact on African growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research on the determinants of regional economic development typically neglects the influence of culture. This study fills that gap by attempting to establish a causal linkage between culture and economic development in the Chinese context. Our empirical analyses are based on a comprehensive economic statistics of China's provinces and prefectures during 1978 to 2008. We use Protestantism as a proxy for culture because Protestant ethic has been linked to the spirit of capitalism and commercial culture in Weber's famous work. To isolate the exogenous variation in culture measure, historical Protestant dissemination is employed as instruments. The estimation results suggest that Christian commercial culture has a significantly positive impact on economic performance - per capita GDP after other important influences (i.e., capital, population, human resources, institutional quality, trade, infrastructure, geography, etc.) are controlled for. We also find heterogeneous effects of culture on economic development in different regions of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]