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Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reconsiders the classical theoretical question on the relationship between urbanisation and development and the effects of administrative status and path dependency on urbanisation using the dual‐track urbanisation framework. It examines the different effects of the determinants of urbanisation on state‐sponsored and spontaneous urbanisation in Fujian Province of China during the 2000–2010 period. Various explanatory variables describing administrative status and demographic and economic conditions were employed to explain the levels of dual‐track urbanisation using a multivariate statistical analysis of 67 county‐level units. It was found that administrative status affected both state‐sponsored and spontaneous urbanisation. The initial level of urbanisation had strong positive effects on state‐sponsored and spontaneous urbanisation. Most importantly, the development level was the most significant factor in state‐sponsored urbanisation in Fujian, although the secondary sector of the economy had the strongest effect on spontaneous urbanisation. It appears that state‐sponsored urbanisation is strongly path dependent and has advanced in highly developed areas, whereas spontaneous urbanisation is more dynamic and led by the expansion of the manufacturing sector. The paper reveals the different mechanisms of state‐sponsored and spontaneous urbanisation processes in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, first, we measure Chinese time preferences as a whole and by region based on the Euler equation under an assumption of rational expectation. The calculating results show that the rates of Chinese time preference are markedly low for most hypothetical risk attitudes over the concerning period, and there exists heterogeneity in time preferences across regions in China. Second, compared with the estimates for other advanced and emerging countries under the same assumptions and same methodology, the rates of Chinese time preference are the lowest for any given risk preference, suggesting that Chinese are more patient during the time of our examinations. Third, our measured time preferences are powerful in predicting China's high saving rates and rapid growth rates of gross domestic product. In addition, the differences in economic growth rates between China and other sample countries can be partially explained by the differences of estimated cross‐countries time preferences within our sample period. Fourth, we investigate the additional factors that affect the Chinese time preferences. Our study provides insights on the regional and international differences in economic growth rates and other economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of China's population control policy on its economic transitions and long‐run equilibrium theoretically and quantitatively. The model‐predicted technological progress is assumed to be driven by population size and education level. With population control, the total number of children decreases; however, the average education level increases. Since the overall effect on technological progress is ambiguous, we performed a quantitative analysis of the model. The results demonstrate that population, technological progress, and income per capita move in endogenous cycles. The impact of China's population control policy depends on the timing of its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With sustained economic growth, environmental pollution in China has become increasingly serious and displays certain regional differences. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of economic growth, energy consumption, and environmental pollution in China and understand the dynamic pollution mechanisms for the implementation of regional collaborative governance. Based on the theory of the environmental Kuznets curve, this paper uses panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2008 to 2018 and applies a spatial analysis model to study the correlation among economic growth, energy consumption, and the spatial distribution of environmental pollution. A spatial measurement method is adopted to study the spatial effects of economic growth and energy consumption on environmental pollution. The results show that economic growth, the energy structure, and industrial pollution in China are spatially correlated and that there are different agglomeration areas in the spatial distribution. In terms of the temporal dimension, the energy consumption effect and technological pollution effect in China led to increased environmental pollution, and changes in the structure effect indirectly improved the environmental situation. In the spatial dimension, the high‐value clusters of the structural, energy consumption, and technological pollution effects are mainly in the central and western regions of China, and the low‐value clusters are mostly in the eastern and northeastern regions of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, several studies have assessed whether foreign aid plays an active role in promoting economic growth of the recipient country, but to date, it is still an unresolved question. Based on the case of Japan's aid to China, this paper uses the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model to evaluate the economic effect of aid, compared with the ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. The results reveal the following: (1) In the OLS model, Japanese aid to China surprisingly hampered China's economic growth. (2) In the GWR model, the Japanese aid's effectiveness appears a noticeable regional differentiation in line with both the orientation and extent of aid. (3) In the GTWR model, however, the economic effectiveness of aid changes both over time and in space. The spatiotemporal heterogeneous relationship between foreign aid and economic growth in a recipient country challenges the traditional belief that aid either can or cannot promote the recipient country's economic growth. This finding provides a new perception of the economic effectiveness of aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International travel has been hypothesized to shape large cross‐country differences in productivity and income. However, evidence supporting this hypothesis, especially from developing countries, remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by studying a novel historical natural experiment—China's removal of travel restrictions on foreigners to designated Open‐to‐Foreigners‐Counties (OFCs). Utilizing the county‐by‐county rollout of the OFCs, we find that removing travel restrictions on foreigners led to a 7.4% increase in per capita industrial output for the OFCs in 1985–1991. The positive effects are larger in counties with more foreign equipment and greater industrial human capital. We highlight the role of person‐based international knowledge diffusion in the economic catch‐up of technology recipient countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions of social mobility vary across countries. However, past studies have mostly focused on populations in Western developed countries. Little is known about perceptions of social mobility in non‐Western developing countries. The current paper focuses on Chinese perceptions of social mobility using a large‐scale nationally representative sample. We found that, overall, Chinese believed in upward social mobility. Moreover, different patterns of perceptions of social mobility were identified, which suggest that respondents experienced either upward or downward social mobility in the past, but all of them thought that they can move up in the future. Perceptions of social mobility were also linked to important sociodemographic and economic factors. We discuss these findings in relation to the Chinese economic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the effect of population aging on economic growth in China. Aging is widely assumed to impact economic growth by shaping the labor market performance and human capital. Using an interactive fixed effects model and a provincial panel data set during 1990–2015, and also exploiting the predicted province‐by‐year variation in population aging fraction as an instrument, we examine the impact of population aging on the growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, labor force ratio, and labor productivity. The results show that a 10% increase in the fraction of the population aged 65+ decreases the growth rate of GDP per capita by approximately 2%. Furthermore, channel decomposition shows that half of the decrease is due to slower growth of the labor force ratio, whereas the rest may be due to slower productivity growth. In addition, the negative effect of aging on GDP growth is more substantial after the year 2000, and the effect of aging on the labor force ratio and productivity shows different patterns during different periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares the economic progress of two countries, South Africa and China, in relation to the Lewis model. These economies are chosen because they have interesting similarities and also interesting differences. At the start of economic reform in China and with the advent of democracy in South Africa, both countries had surplus labour: they were at the first, labour‐surplus, stage of the Lewis model. It is shown that, since then, South Africa has continued to experience surplus labour: the unemployment rate has risen. By contrast, China's labour market is shown to have tightened, and there is evidence that China has entered the second, labour‐scarce, stage of the Lewis model. The difference lies in their growth rates. There are sections explaining why the South African economy has grown slowly and why the Chinese economy has grown rapidly, in relation to the growth of their labour forces. The Lewis model provides an enlightening framework for explaining how widely the fruits of economic development can be shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that the rotation and promotion system of local political chiefs plays an important role in China's economic miracle. In this paper, however, we focus on the potential cost of the inherent frequent turnover of local chiefs. Based on a new manually collected dataset on prefectural‐level local chiefs between 1983 and 2012, our empirical results suggest that the turnover of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief would lead to a 0.48 percentage point decrease in the local GDP growth rate in the current year. This effect is especially concentrated on more government‐affected fields, such as domestic investments, consumption and government expenditures. We also provide evidence that organization friction, especially the successor CCP chiefs' unfamiliarity with the city, his/her new colleagues and/or the working conditions, is one of the major potential reasons for such a negative turnover effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth in China in recent decades has largely rested on the dynamism of its cities. High economic growth has coincided with measures aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments and with a mounting political drive to curb corruption. Yet the connection between government institutions and urban growth in China remains poorly understood. This paper is the first to look into the link between government efficiency and corruption, on the one hand, and urban growth in China, on the other hand and to assess what is the role of institutions relative to more traditional factors for economic growth in Chinese cities. Using panel data for 283 cities over the period between 2003 and 2014, the results show that the urban growth in China is a consequence of a combination of favorable human capital, innovation, density, local conditions, foreign direct investment, and city‐level government institutions. Both government quality—especially for those cities with the best governments—and the fight against corruption at the city level have a direct effect on urban growth. Measures to tackle corruption at the provincial level matter in a more indirect way, by raising or lowering the returns of other growth‐inducing factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a panel of 31 provinces and cities from 1990 to 2019, we first conduct an empirical analysis using the maximum likelihood (ML) procedure to examine the effects of various disasters (i.e. droughts, floods, earthquakes, storms, typhoons and low and freezing temperatures) on the medium‐term economic growth of China and its three economic regions (i.e. the eastern, central and western regions). We identify the transmission channels through which these disasters affect economic growth by investigating the medium‐term relationships among disasters, capital accumulation, human capital accumulation and total factor productivity. The interprovincial empirical analysis demonstrates that the effects differ across the economic regions. Thus, disasters affect economic growth through different channels but mainly through capital stock. Further research indicates that the growth effect of disasters largely benefits from Chinese government expenditures on disaster relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's economic growth is making it difficult to deal with the issue of decreasing energy consumption and improving energy efficiency as the world's largest energy user and supplier. This research, which uses theoretical and empirical studies and chooses 30 provinces panel data from China between 2005 and 2021, demonstrates the impacts of natural resources, technological advancement, and the growth of sustainable energy sources and their methods. The findings indicate that (1) Natural resources significantly promote the growth of renewable energy sources, (2) The development and technological innovations can benefit from using natural resources and (3) The growth of sustainable energy is positively affected by technological improvement. The study provides significant suggestions to assist regions in improving their energy sustainability. The results guide developing nations looking to leverage financial development, green investment and technological innovation in productive areas to achieve sustainable development objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global economic recession caused by COVID‐19 has posed a severe threat to the feasibility of renewable energy projects, hampering the United Nation (UN) sustainable development goals. Sustainable financing (SF) is a crucial instrument for promoting investment in renewable energy (IRE) sources, as it is regarded as a crucial aspect in achieving long‐term sustainability. This study sheds insight on the impact of SF, geopolitical risk (GPR), economic growth (EG), and environmental regulation (ER) on IRE sources by evaluating 10 years of data from 35 Chinese energy businesses from 2012 to 2021. The data analysis is done by utilizing quantile regression and dynamic analytic techniques, demonstrating that SF, EG, and ER have a significant positive effect on IRE sources. However, GPR has a significant detrimental impact on IRE in China. This is one of the early studies to examine the crucial role of SF, GPR, EG, and ER in IRE, which is critical for environmental sustainability. In addition, it provides policymakers and environmentalists with crucial insights for developing and executing environmental strategies that can deliver long‐term benefits and meet SD goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: On the basis of development accounting techniques and a factor misallocation framework, we use panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2013 to assess how factor allocation affects economic growth and unbalanced regional development in China. In particular, we decompose economic growth into three parts, namely sector productivity (SP), factor market efficiency (FME) and factor endowment (FE). We then conduct counterfactual analyses to investigate the short and long‐run roles of factor allocation in the income distribution across provinces. The results show that SP, FME and FE can explain 23%, 8.5% and 68.5% of economic growth, while labour, capital and energy reallocation account for aggregate productivity growth of about 47%, −4.8% and −0.1%. Furthermore, when the factors are efficiently allocated, transferring labour (capital, energy) from agriculture (service, industry) to the other sectors will increase the income per capita by 29.5% and 42.5% in the short and long term. Meanwhile, efficient factor allocation accounts for 32% and 29.7% of aggregate productivity and reduces the income variation across provinces by 25.5% and 23% in the short and long run, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using cross-country panel data, this study identifies and discusses major factors contributing to China's strong growth in the past four decades. China's low initial per capita income relative to its own long-run potential, combined with sound policy factors including a high investment rate, strong human capital, high trade openness and improved institutions, enabled the economy to converge with advanced economies in terms of income level. The shift-share analysis with industry-level data shows that strong labour productivity growth in the manufacturing sector largely contributed to China's overall labour productivity growth. Although labour reallocation from agriculture to the services sector made a positive contribution to aggregate labour productivity growth, labour productivity growth in the services sector itself was negative over the 1980-2010 period. China's average potential GDP growth is predicted to decline significantly in the coming decade, to 5%-6% and fall further to 3%-4%-due to the convergence effect and structural problems-unless China substantially upgrades its institutions and policy factors and improves productivity, particularly in its services sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to investigate the possibility of achieving Chinese climate and sustainable development goals (SDGs) with technological innovations and renewable energy policies. Currently, China is ranked first in global emissions. Hence, we utilized Chinese data of 1996Q1 2018Q4 to investigate the policy implication of technological innovation and renewal energy towards its climate goals. Economic development, technology, energy and environmental policies are incorporated in our study for clear insight on the impact of technology and renewable energy on China's climate goals. We adopt different scientific approaches (structural break, bound method of co‐integration, autoregressive dynamic lag‐ARDL dynamics and granger causality test) for both quantitative and theoretical analyses. Our discussions and policy inference are based on the findings from ARDL and granger causality analyses. Findings from ARDL tests debunk the inverted U‐shape EKC hypothesis for China. Technological innovations and renewable energies are found impacting favorably on Chinese environment by reducing carbon emissions. Output derived from Causality supports the results from ARDL with nexus established amongst the selected instruments. From the findings, we conclude by advocating for policy to be framed on renewable energy sector through investment and technological boosting towards a SDG for China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a performance‐based promotion mechanism that rewards economic growth, we demonstrate how local governments' chiefs are incentivized to make policy decisions favored by upper‐level offices. Using annual data from prefectures in China, we find evidence that in response to a higher level of competition in the geographic cluster, local chiefs implement several growth‐enhancing policies. These include prioritizing investment in public infrastructure over redistributive spending and allocating additional resources in the core regions, relative to the cross‐jurisdictional borders. We also find that these policies lead to further regional growth. The results remain consistent even when we instrument the endogenous political replacements with the sudden death of chiefs, and when we use various measures for the effectiveness of chiefs. This evidence suggests that relative performance evaluation plays an essential role in the political system of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research considers the effects of air transport on economic growth and asks how airport development affects regional convergence across three Chinese macro‐regions. A growing body of research has examined national aviation‐growth relationships in developing countries over the last decade. Yet few studies have sought to determine whether air transport boosts regional development, especially in developing and emerging economies. Using a dataset spanning from 2005 to 2017, and drawing on panel data regression and instrumental variable analyses, we provide empirical evidence that air transport drives economic growth in China and its macro‐regions. However, we find no major synergy across air, high‐speed rail, and waterway transport as drivers of economic growth at national and regional levels. Furthermore, air transport has a significant effect in widening China's per capita income disparity. On that basis, we suggest Chinese local governments should carefully consider equity‐efficiency trade‐offs and provincial and municipal conditions and regional contexts when planning new airports, increasing airport services, or extending aviation connectivity. Others elsewhere may derive insights from these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although researchers have made significant efforts to explain the influence of institutions on environmental indicators such as CO2 emissions, the relationship between institutional quality and the ecological footprint has been neglected. The gap in the literature reveals an outstanding question: can institutions reduce their countryʼs ecological footprint? As a result, this study aims to investigate the effects of institutional quality and control variables on the ecological footprint for the period 1992–2015 in E‐7 countries through the AMG and CCEMG estimators. The findings show that institutional quality reduces the ecological footprint for the entire panel. Conversely, economic growth and energy consumption increase ecological pressure on E‐7 countries. In addition, the impact of institutional quality on the ecological footprint demonstrates heterogeneity at the country level. While institutions decrease the ecological footprint in China, India, Indonesia, and Russia, the study does not find such a relationship in other countries. Besides, energy consumption seems to be the most important factor in increasing ecological pressure in all countries. As drawn from the results, it can be said that improving institutional quality and increasing renewable resources in the energy portfolio are strategic actions in terms of improving environmental quality in E‐7 countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the causal relationship between financial innovation and economic growth in China, India, and Pakistan over the period of 1970–2016. Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing and Granger causality‐based Error Correction Model (ECM), this study finds that financial innovation generally has a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth in the short‐run and long‐run. These results show that in the long‐run, monetary management and credit flow to the private sector play an essential role in economic growth. The trade openness and gross capital formation contribute considerably to the economic growth in China, India, and Pakistan. For robustness, this study also applies the Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) and Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) method. The findings of this study suggest that the financial sector plays an essential role in supporting innovation activity in Asian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous literature has addressed an asymmetric response of economic growth to oil price movements in developed economies, less widely recognised is the possibility of such responses in developing economies. Thus, the primary thrust of the present article is to investigate the asymmetric effects of changes in crude oil prices on growth in a developing economy, particularly China. To examine this subject thoroughly, we first assume oil price symmetry and apply the method of the linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) to China's 31 provinces. We discover that the price of crude oil has a significant effect on growth mostly in the short‐run. We then separate oil price hikes from oil price plunges and implement the method of the nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) to reveal that the price of crude oil has indeed an important role in affecting growth across China's 31 provinces in both the short‐ and long‐run. Further, there is evidence that fluctuations in oil prices appear to have asymmetric effects on growth for some provinces, though not all, in the short‐ and long‐run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the relationship between CO2 emissions in China and its prospective determinants, namely economic growth, globalization, financial development, and natural resources during the period from 1980 to 2017. We present more detailed analyses across multiple econometric approaches within a multivariate system, e.g., the Bayer‐Hanck combined cointegration approach, the ARDL bounds test approach, ARDL estimates in short run and long run, robustness check by cointegration regressions (i.e., FMOLS, DOLS, CCR), and Granger causality approach in the frequency domain. Our results show that economic growth and natural resources have a positive impact on CO2 emissions in China, although globalization contributes to improving its environmental quality. Meanwhile, there is no statistical evidence that CO2 emissions in China could be affected by financial development. The causality analysis reveals that globalization, economic growth and natural resources all lead to CO2 emissions in the long run, while financial development only causes the short‐run CO2 emissions, which further demonstrate our findings. Such findings are meaningful for policymakers to achieve the sustainable development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: The relationship between unequal fiscal resources among regions and China's economic growth remains unclear due to its possibly different short‐ and long‐run directions. This study considers the role of unequal fiscal resources among regions in China's economic growth. Purpose: The article develops an empirical model to investigate the effect of unequal regional distribution of fiscal resources on China's economic growth in the short and long run in the post‐reform period. Approach and Methods: A time‐series data during the 1979–2010 period is used, adopting the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach plus co‐integration with two indicators of inequality, the GINI coefficient (GINI) and coefficient of variance (CV), calculated from different components of provincial fiscal revenue. Six model specifications of the ARDL plus co‐integration equation are estimated. Findings: The primary finding is that, in the short run, China's regional fiscal distribution inequality has a negative one‐year lagged effect on its economic growth as the fiscal subsidy from central government is considered. However, the long‐run equilibrium relationship between fiscal inequality and economic growth in China is positive during the research period. Policy Implications: As China is pursuing sustainable economic growth and trying ultimately to achieve equal regional development, this study thus suggests that China should continue to support the principle of 'let some people grow rich first', perhaps implying that some regions should have more fiscal resources to develop successfully first. This will eventually benefit the country's overall economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies report the growth effects from labor reallocation in China to be in the order of 1–2 percentage points per year, which would appear to be a significant fraction of China's per capita income growth. We show that the total factor productivity gains are an order of magnitude smaller, at only 0.25 percentage points per year. There are two reasons for this difference. First, the majority of studies have used a decomposition method that effectively assumes linear production functions. This results in values that are much larger than the more appropriate Denison–Kuznets method. Second, we also allow for sectoral differences in human capital. We conclude that the gains from labor reallocation may have been a far less important source of China's growth than is conventionally thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: When evaluating agricultural policy changes, much of the attention in the literature has been limited to agricultural productivity growth. This study demonstrates that, under a regionally decentralised authority system, the effect of China's abolition of the agricultural tax (AAT) in 2004–05 extended beyond the realm of agriculture. We find that, following the AAT reform, Chinese counties with higher reliance on agricultural taxation for budgetary revenue prior to the AAT reform experienced higher agricultural economic growth, as expected, but lower non‐agricultural economic growth in the short run. This growth‐inhibiting effect of the AAT reform on non‐agricultural production in the short run can be explained, to some extent, by the increased non‐agricultural taxation due to the insufficient funds that Chinese county governments received from the upper‐level governments following the AAT reform; the magnitude of this tax increase was associated with the degree to which each county relied on agricultural taxation for budgetary revenue prior to the reform. In addition, our results show that the AAT reform resulted in a high level of regional inequality in terms of non‐agricultural GDP per capita. In summary, our study shows that although the AAT reform succeeded in promoting agricultural production, such accomplishments were achieved at the cost of lower non‐agricultural output growth and higher regional inequality of non‐agricultural GDP per capita at the county level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]