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The opening of equity markets to foreign investment by developing countries appears to generate an enormously large positive growth effect (see Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad (2005), Journal of Financial Economics 77, 3–55) in spite of a relatively small role of such markets for financing investment in most economies. We propose a spillover channel from equity market opening to lower costs of bank loans, which helps to explain this puzzle. From analyzing bank loan data associated with China's introduction of the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors program, we find significant support for this channel. Furthermore, we show that a reduction in the risk premium in loans is an important mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides micro-level evidence for the role of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) in the cross-border transmission of global financial uncertainty shocks. Using Chinese firm-level data, we find that rising uncertainty has a significantly larger contractionary effect on real investment for FIEs than their local counterparts. This effect is more pronounced for firms faced with greater investment irreversibility or financial constraints. The contractionary effect is mainly driven by downside uncertainty, whereas upside uncertainty is modestly expansionary. Similar effects are found for other firm-level performances. There is also a spillover effect to local private firms with FIEs concentrated in downstream sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how a fiscal expansion via infrastructure investment influences the dynamic impacts of monetary stimulus on credit allocation. We develop a two‐stage approach and apply it to the Chinese economy with a confidential loan‐level data set that covers all sectors. We find that infrastructure investment significantly weakened monetary policy's transmission to credit allocated to private firms, while reinforcing the monetary effects on loans to state‐owned firms. This fiscal‐monetary interaction channel is key to understanding the preferential credit access enjoyed by state‐owned firms during the stimulus period. Consequently, monetary stimulus crowded out private investment and decreased capital allocation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the housing boom and economic slowdown in China in a dynamic New Keynesian model. The model features a novel channel of firms' dynamic portfolio choice between physical and housing investment. Housing assets earn a positive return and can be used as collateral for the firm's external finances. A negative productivity shock decreases the relative return of production capital, which translates into a housing boom by increasing the firm's housing demand. A rise in house prices then generates competing effects on real investment: it raises the firm's leverage due to the collateral effect and depresses the firm's demand for physical capital because of the crowding‐out effect. After calibrating the model for the Chinese economy, our quantitative exercise suggests the former effect is dominated by the latter, resulting in countercyclical housing prices. The policy analysis shows that the capital subsidization policy targeting house prices performs better than other macro‐economic policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While past studies have enriched our understanding of the impact of returnee executives on firm market strategy and outcomes, we know relatively little about the relationship between returnee executives and firm nonmarket strategies. Grounded in upper echelons theory, this study explores the relationship between returnee executives and corporate philanthropy, the latter of which is an important nonmarket strategy in emerging economies such as China. Using data on publicly listed Chinese companies from 2010 to 2017, we find that the proportion of returnee executives is negative related to corporate philanthropy. We also find that this negative relationship is strengthened by executive ownership, but weakened by corporate prominence and political connections. Our study makes important theoretical contributions to strategic leadership research, upper echelons theory, and the literature of corporate philanthropy. The managerial implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are still many uncertainties regarding the possible influences of global climate change in the mid-latitude regions, owing to rather limited research and lack of empirical evidence. This paper systematically evaluates the economic impact of climate variation by constructing a 27-year panel dataset of 274 prefecture cities and 816 weather stations in China. Our results document some significant climate–economic relationships, with the increase of 1 °C-temperature, 100 mm-rainfall, and 1%-humidity associated with a 0.78% decrease, 0.86% increase and 1.34% decrease in output, respectively. Higher temperature damages are reflected in less-developed regions, while the positive impact of rainfall mainly appear in more-developed regions. Using integrated assessment models, we project that the model-average climate damage of China may account for up to 4.23 percent of GDP by 2100, based on a nonlinear historical climate–economic interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-quality economic development (HQED) has recently become a crucial sustainable growth mode in China, which pursues economic growth while maintaining social equity and green ecology. The HQED of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) has played an exemplary role in achieving the leap from "China speed" to "China Quality". In this paper, we first use the entropy-weight multidimensional comprehensive evaluation method to calculate the HQED index as a proxy for the quality of economic growth. Then, using panel data of 41 cities in the YRD, we conduct a comparative study to examine impacts of technological innovation (TI) on quantity and quality of economic growth by employing different panel estimation models over the period 2009-2019 and check the robustness in five ways. Finally, this paper investigates the TI-economic growth link based on the panel quantile regression across the conditional distributions of economic growth levels. Results show that TI has significantly positive effects in terms of both quantity and quality of economic growth, and the promoting effect on the quantity of economic growth is almost four times higher than that of quality under mean estimations by double fixed-effects. The effect on quantity of economic growth is also stronger than that of quality under the conditional distribution, and TI has a stronger impact for regions with higher levels of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite persistent skepticism towards the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), many countries have signed on to the program and even more countries have come to believe in its transformative potential to development finance and the global order. How has the illiberal Chinese government succeeded in convincing the world, particularly the Global South, about its commitment and BRI's future success? Exploring the credibility puzzle, this article argues that the Xi Jinping administration has relied on an all-in strategy tying the BRI to China's national development and foreign policy, promoting the BRI through select international institutions, and launching a series of flagship mega-projects. With mounting sustainability challenges on both economic and geopolitical fronts, however, the BRI now has to scale back its ambitions while China reevaluates its strategic opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the recent emergence of political consumerism in Hong Kong. Given its potential implications, we document the origin and maturation of this development and theoretically explain political consumerism from three perspectives: as a response to China's economic intervention, as a form of identity politics, and as a new form of political participation. Drawing on original data collected from a representative survey of the local population, supplemented by interviews with stakeholders from the pro- democracy economic circle, we found that people who opposed China-Hong Kong economic integration and expressed a strong local (as opposed to national) identity tended to support boycotting. People who engaged in political consumerism were active in both legal and radical protests, pointing to the complementary nature of these different forms of activism. Further, by adopting a mediation analysis, we find that support towards the Anti-extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement only partially mediate the effect of the factors on political consumerism, suggesting that they are distinct development despite their shared origins. This article provides a novel perspective on the political polarisation in Hong Kong among consumer markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes factors behind the rapid deterioration of India–Nepal relations since September 2015, when Nepal's Constituent Assembly adopted a new constitution. Nepal's Madhesis, roughly 30 percent of Nepal's population, concentrated in the southern plain region, rejected the constitution, as it did not address the grievances against which they had been protesting. The Madhesi demands were also supported by India. In fast-tracking the adoption of the constitution, Nepal's major party leaders had also shunned India's advice. India escalated by imposing an economic blockade on landlocked Nepal from the major transit points along the India-Nepal border; Nepal called it an unjustified "blockade." Kathmandu, in turn, moved closer to India's top rival, China, to thwart the Indian pressure. China's role has continued to rise after India opened the transit points in early 2016. Nepal's relations with India took a further plunge in 2020 as Nepal objected to the inclusion of some of Nepal's westernmost areas in India's revised map. Nepal's post-monarchy politics and China's leveraging of its economic and political strength to grow its influence in Nepal have raised new challenges to the hitherto dominant role that India has historically played. India's growing strategic closeness to the United States further complicates Nepal's relations with its influential neighbors. The historic tendency on the part of Nepal's political leaders to seek foreign support in their factional and interparty rivalries has further widened the scope for external meddling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes how political factors, cultural and geographical distance, and agglomeration affect the distribution of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) through a study of information and communication technologies (ICT) firms using nested logit models. The results show that ownership, Chinese ethnic networks, and sectoral agglomeration are the most important factors. Political risk does not have a consistent effect on OFDI, state-owned enterprises are inclined to invest in countries with a higher level of political risk. We also find that various functions display different locational preferences and that there is a clear trend toward vertical agglomeration among various functions. By integrating place-based political institutions and space-based cultural and geographical distance into the research, our study unfolds the complexity of location decisions regarding Chinese OFDI. It highlights the importance of national, industrial, and functional idiosyncrasies in determining OFDI location choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's plan to establish a social credit system (SCS) has aroused the concern of building a surveillance state. Yet this view oversimplifies and misunderstands the essence of the SCS. The highest priorities of the SCS are promoting economic credibility and reinforcing court orders. Meanwhile, the SCS aims to steer citizens' social behaviors and interactions by utilizing a redlist system that introduces numerous moderate rewards. The SCS is also more lax in execution than in planning. It reflects a unique Chinese understanding of law, which treats law as a moral guide. This article also acknowledges the concerns for the SCS. Without actively preventing positive and negative invasions in the construction of the project, the SCS authorities will risk creating further mistrust in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese logistics service market is a vibrant and highly contested arena. The industry, however, has been characterised as operationally inefficient in comparison with those of the developed economies. Shortage of logistics human resources and lack of logistics expertise have been identified as two of the key contributory factors. Based on responses from 76 Chinese logistics service providers to a survey conducted in 2010, this study explores whether, and how, four sets of human resource management (HRM) practices contribute to nurturing three logistics and supply chain (L&SC) competencies in the Chinese logistics service market. Results from a hierarchical multiple regression analysis show that not all HRM practices were equally effective in building L&SC competencies. While training and development, and recruitment and selection were significant in contributing to nurturing the three L&SC competencies, both performance management and reward management did not. These findings suggest that conventional HRM practices designed to reward individual performance may not be suited to nurturing team-based L&SC competencies in the Chinese context. The implications of these findings were discussed and directions for further studies offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors report the findings of a study conducted among a sample of 202 Hong Kong-based Chinese importing companies regarding their working relationships with Western export manufacturers. In particular, the study emphasizes the effect of interpersonal factors on financial performance through the intervening roles of intercompany trust and relationship quality. Using structural equation modeling, the authors confirm that (1) several interpersonal relational dimensions--namely, personal communication (sijiao,), personal credibility (xinyongj, and personal affection fganqingj--positively influence interfirm trust; (2) trust plays an instrumental role in enhancing the components of the interfirm relationship quality (i.e., cooperation, commitment, and satisfaction); (3) interfirm relationship quality is positively related to superior financial performance; and (4) most of the associations between each of the interpersonal factors and interfirm trust were moderated by the importer's size and foreign supplier's origin as well as by the length of the relationship and which party initiated the relationship. The authors extract several conclusions and implications from the findings and provide directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid growing interest in China's role in financing and building infrastructure in Africa, there is still little research on how Chinese-financed infrastructures are negotiated and realised at the city and metropolitan scale. We compare the Light Rail Transit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with the expressway linking Kampala to Entebbe airport in Uganda, examining the processes of bargaining behind these transport infrastructures and their emergent effects on urban land use and city-dwellers' mobility. We find that both projects were designed and implemented through opaque negotiations between African national elites and Chinese agencies, with little or no engagement from city authorities, leading to haphazard outcomes that are poorly integrated with broader planning. Yet we also suggest that despite being enabled and mediated by Chinese agencies, such projects do not embody a Chinese global vision. They instead reflect the entrepreneurial activities of Chinese contractors and the varying ways in which these connect with African national governments' shifting priorities. Moreover, as they are subsumed into the urban context, these transposed infrastructures have been rapidly repurposed and their 'Chineseness' diluted, with one morphing into an infrastructure for the poor and the other into a site of private value extraction. We thus argue that, far from representing a domineering or neo-colonial influence, Chinese-financed infrastructures that land in institutionally complex African city-regions can be rapidly swallowed up into the political-economic landscape, producing contingent benefits and disbenefits that are far removed from the visions of any planners – Chinese or African, past or present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese companies have continued to increase foreign direct investment (FDI) and engagement within Africa, perceived as a last global frontier market, particularly in light of China's Belt and Road initiative. The literature highlights a number of human resources management (HRM) risks, challenges and misalignments, including values gaps between Chinese company expats and local stakeholders, affecting achievement of the objectives of FDI. Whilst Chinese (Confucianism) and African (Ubuntu) cultural values may appear similar on the surface, there are significant differences in their finer detail that cause HRM challenges in practice. This ethnographic study examined a Chinese manufacturer in post-apartheid South Africa, decoding significant gaps in values towards key themes affecting HRM relations between Chinese expats and local personnel, such as styles of communication, community building, transparency, and planning horizon. Addressing these values gaps was critical to achieving positive HRM outcomes, and thus to the success of the local organization and ultimately the achievement of FDI objectives. Recommendations indicate how the organization and individuals can further contribute towards bridging values gaps, thereby building HRM relations and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is an intellectually overwhelming paradox within development thinking. On the one hand, it is regarded as an economic powerhouse pushing forward decades of sustained growth, which even during major global crises, such as the Corona-epidemic and the 2008 Financial Crisis, bounced back with significant resilience. On the other hand, it appears burdened with all of the 'wrong' institutions: informal, insecure, and autocratic. This collection of papers posits that the paradox is no contradiction when understood through an alternative, theoretical lens: the function of institutions precedes form when trying to understand institutional performance. Thus, whether institutions are formal or informal, public or private, democratic or autocratic, is of secondary importance to the manner in which they function over time and space. To examine this hypothesis, known as the 'credibility thesis', the collection examines China's institutions that govern: 1) capital; 2) technology; 3) land, and; 4) labor; in effect, state-owned banks, collective firms, corporate law and securities, patents and intellectual property rights, environmental bans, and the civil registration or hukou system. In so doing, it not only falsifies the widely prevalent assumption that institutional form determines performance, but concurrently, validates the applicability of the credibility thesis over widely varying sectors and assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enduring paradox of China's remarkable economic growth is the lack of a well-established legal system. By drawing on the credibility thesis, this paper proposes that legal and economic reforms give rise to, and reinforce, the other and the market is underpinned by evolving institutions that are shaped by the expectations of the actors in the economy. It is thus not the form of institutions but their function that is more important in assessing institutional performance. A comparative examination of the USA at a similar stage of legal-institutional development to China provides support for an evolutionary, endogenous process. This institutional analysis will focus on key issues of economic legislation, such as corporate law, patent law and securities. Analyzing the relationship as complementary processes can help explain the paradox of strong economic growth within an under-developed system of law with potential, critical implications for institutional development in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evolved from promotion of Eurasian connectivity into a catchall for Chinese foreign policy and infrastructure investments worldwide. Although usually portrayed as a top-down geopolitical project of the Chinese central government, this article argues the BRI is actually shaped by converging and diverging interests of a wide variety of actors within and outside China. In order to conceptualize the relational, contingent, and unstable emergence of the BRI in Latin America, the article emphasizes the process of co-production as a theoretical framework. It first analyzes how the BRI incorporated Latin America through policy and discourse analysis, then examines the multi-scalar and multi-sited co-production of Chinese-funded port and railroad infrastructures through interviews and public documents in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate mutual impacts between China's global investment and maritime transportation system as a primary means for trading since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been launched. This study collected China's global investment data categorized by independent economy entities with featured data, including investment capital, industrial field, and the maritime flows generated from the previous study. The country-level mutual relations in the context of the BRI are formulated and investigated by data-driven geographical visualization methods. The test results reveal both the degree and tendency of China's initiative impacting the global investment and the possible patterns and inertial power of investment on a globally regional initiative, primarily focusing on the concerns and contributions of the maritime transportation system in promoting investment and the BRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how China's increased economic influence shapes its image among foreign audiences. Specifically, it examines the effect of trade relationship with China on the perception of China. A systematic analysis of the data from recent three waves of the Asia Barometer Survey (ABS) consistently shows that, at the country-level, trade exposure to China is associated with a less favorable public view of China. At the individual level, the authors find that trade exposure weakens the positive relationship between individuals' assessment of the domestic economic situation and their perception of China. Meanwhile, political factors such as individuals' political orientation and regime difference correlate with a negative image of China, and trade relationship cannot mitigate this "soft power deficit." In short, trade relationship does not help promote a positive image of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's Bank of China (PBC)has played an important role in China's sustained economic growth. Despite its limited formal independence, PBC has developed considerable de facto authority and autonomy, referered to here as central bank discretion (CBD). This article offers a detailed historical account of how PBChas gained growing CBD in areas such as monetary policy, financial stability, foreign exchange and financial regulation. It also analyzes the main underlying forces that have contributed to PBC's authority and autonomy.This study of CBD in China seeks to enrich the existing literature on the political economy of central banking, which has so far focused heavily on the concept of central bank independence (CBI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huawei serves as a vehicle for presenting the multiple barriers faced by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) that happen to be born in China, a non-democratic and non-Western country who now challenges the world's No.1 superpower, thus requires a multi-disciplinary analytical framework by taking much broader contexts into considerations. This comparative case study of its operations in the US and UK aims to develop the old model of examining Chinese MNEs that is heavily economic factor focused by including more variables, such as 'bilateral relations', 'law', 'media influence' and 'cultural proximity' under host country factors, and 'governance structure' under home country factors. The new model will show the increasing complexity in the global competitive landscape and inspire more research to further advance understanding of this new international business phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internally, China is celebrating its successes while having to overcome its dilemmas and complications caused by those accomplishments; externally the nature of its rise is being questioned by some and emulated by others. Under the condition, one must have a more clear-eyed view of China's achievements thus far along with its challenges and opportunities for future success. The books reviewed in this article include William H. Overholt's China's Crisis of Success, Graham Allison's Destined for War and a collection edited by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi, The China Questions. Each of these volumes presents timely and authoritative analyses, covering a range of issues to generate a much-needed conversation to recognize China as it is without resorting to excessive alarmism or senseless optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To tackle internal and external challenges, the Chinese government has made great efforts to promote economic upgrading, but little scholarly attention has been paid to its social consequences. Previous studies have found that economic restructuring is often associated with economic shock and industry shift, noting that social upgrading does not automatically follow economic upgrading, and workers can become economic victims. Given China's individual rights-based labour regulatory framework, it is necessary to explore workers' individual strategies to tackle economic restructuring. In light of this, this study analyses how migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta cope with economic restructuring. Interviews were conducted with 72 participants, including migrant workers, scholars, employers and officials. The interviews revealed that to deal with the pushing-out effect of economic restructuring, migrant workers often use strategies of individual resistance, re-employment, skill upgrading, reducing living costs, migrating to other cities, and returning to farming. Policy recommendations are proposed accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beijing's proposal for a China–Nepal–India Economic Corridor (CNIEC) with multi-dimensional connectivity through the Himalayas aims at contributing development and prosperity for all three countries. While Beijing calls for Nepal's development to be one of the major objectives of the proposed corridor, the proposal has received a cold response from India so far. The recent territorial conflicts between China and India and between Nepal and India also strengthen scepticism over this proposal. Considering the troubled bilateral relationship between India and China, the future of CNIEC appears to be wishful thinking unless trust and transparency improve. Moreover, their divergence of interests in Nepal only appears to strengthen competition rather than co-operative working. However, the question around the CNIEC remains whether the project offers an opportunity for the two Asian superpowers to join together for regional cooperation involving Nepal. This article examines the potential and challenges of trilateral cooperation through CNIEC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the threat posed by the growth of the Chinese economy to global capitalism. This threat has been attributed to China's integration into global financial markets and the government's decision to allow wholly-owned foreign financial firms to operate in the Chinese securities and futures markets. The increasing volume of transnational investments in Chinese government and corporate bonds is discussed, as well as the growing market role of state-owned enterprises (SEOs).

This article contributes to the politicisation of smart urbanism and data-driven governance by making visible some of the potential inequalities emerging from these transitions through a provisional risk-class analysis. To pursue this analysis, it focuses on the case of smart urbanism and its associated process of data-driven governance in China. It looks specifically at the manner in which Chinese smart urbanism, in terms of its security measures, including widespread use of facial recognition and the roll-out of social credit scoring, is affecting inequalities. This article proposes risk-class analysis as a toolbox that can pose new questions in the search for what types of potential risks and inequalities emerge from the smart urbanism and data-driven governance being rolled out in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurs have been a driving force in the rapid development of the Chinese digital game industry. However, in previous studies, little attention has been paid to entrepreneurs' business development and performance, especially the ways in which they obtain key resources in the process of venture creation. Because most gaming entrepreneurs in China have wrestled with fundraising difficulties in recent years, this study was conducted to examine how gaming entrepreneurs acquire financial capital from a social capital perspective. Data were collected from 33 in-depth interviews with gaming entrepreneurs who were operating ventures in Shanghai, one of China's major game industry hubs. The data included detailed accounts of the acquisition of financial capital in relation to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem's four capital providers: business angels, venture capitalists, incubators/accelerators, and government funding agencies. The findings showed that the gaming entrepreneurs in this study used diverse patterns of social capital access and mobilization to acquire financial capital. The findings also showed how the entrepreneurs had adjusted their social capital use in response to the worsening financial market. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on the Chinese digital game industry by articulating how gaming entrepreneurs leverage social resources to enact venture creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike previous research that concentrated on mobile payment's attributes in influencing user adoption decisions, this study focuses on the cultural norms and social environments in which mobile payments are conducted. This study aims to clarify the sociocultural influences of mobile payment systems based on in-depth interviews and participant observations in the Machong town market in China. In the analysis of substantive and instrumental perspectives on the influence of technology, this study found that the entrenched cultural practice of bargaining in China has been disrupted by the widespread adoption of mobile payment technology and supplanted by the new cultural practice of technical sharing, which is becoming increasingly entrenched in the continuing adoption of technology. The findings of this study suggest that technological and commercial logics have powerful reductionist effects on the imagination in technology use and design. To overcome these effects, we propose a co-exploration paradigm for use in the future development of mobile payment technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has yet to import the corporate governance 'canon' (generally accepted rules as promoting share-holder value as well as minority shareholder and other stakeholders' rights) into its Code of Corporate Governance. What effect would Chinese companies' simply adopting such a canon—as defined by Hong Kong or other foreign corporate governance practices—have on their share prices? We look at Mainland Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong, looking at the way their share prices react to economic fluctuations when they have better or worse corporate governance practices. Using a differences-in-differences methodology, that such share prices could/would increase by around 7%—increasing profits by about $330 billion. Yet, a significant part of the distribution of these companies lose money in the short-run. These results provide yet another confirmation that adopting the corporate governance canon can profit companies' investors, but not all of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]