Privatization has boosted Chinese firms’ productivity, both in the short run and the long run. Consumer-oriented industries saw larger gains than “strategic” (heavily regulated) sectors. Chinese patents and “new product” surveys seem less reliable, because any statistics become useless once they become policy targets.
Household education expenditure in China accounts for a substantial portion of household income, averaging around 17.1%, and it is inversely related to household income. As a necessity, education expenditure imposes excessively high costs on lower-income families. China needs to formulate policies to alleviate the financial burden on families, reform the school system, and enhance educational equity.
We find that the widely adopted daily price limit rules may induce large investors as a group to pursue a destructive trading strategy of pushing stock prices to the upper price limit and then profiting from selling these stocks on the next day. Their trading accelerates the price increase on the day that the upper price limit is reached, thus leading to the so-called Magnet Effect. This unintended effect renders the daily price limits — a market stabilization scheme — counterproductive.
This book argues that China’s rapid industrialization since 1978 can be attributed to its rediscovery of the secret recipe of the original Industrial Revolution. The secret recipe is not based on institutional changes per se but rather the sequential creation of mass markets to support mass production. Market creation requires a strong state and appropriate industrial policies because mass markets are a public good that is extremely costly to create and can only be created through stages and under enormous political stability and social trust.
The paper examines China's rising domestic content in exports using firm and customs transaction-level data. China's domestic content in exports increased from 65 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2007. The key reason for China’s ascent on global value chains is due to individual processing exporters substituting domestic products for imported materials, induced by the country’s trade and FDI liberalizations.