The Rural Land Contracting Law (RLCL), announced in 2003, is a landmark law for agricultural households in rural China. It provides new legal protections for leasing agricultural land. In theory, increasing free market exchanges of land should improve agricultural productivity by facilitating the movement of land towards the most productive users. We find that the property rights reform led to a 10 percent increase in land rental activity among rural households, a redistribution of land towards more productive farmers, and a 7 percent increase in the aggregate productivity of land. We also observe an increased responsiveness of land allocation across crops to changes in crop prices.
The 2019 Bank for International Settlements Triennial Foreign Exchange Survey reveals two different trends in RMB trading in 2016–2019 compared to the previous three year interval—a slowdown both in growth and in geographic diffusion. Regarding the first trend, we argue the rapid growth of RMB trading into 2014 relied on a gradual appreciation trend that encouraged a one-sided RMB internationalization. Global trading in RMB resumed its growth in 2017...
Chinese banks have become the largest cross-border lenders to emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). Despite their different ownership structure, their type of global reach resembles that of advanced economies’ (AE) banks, with distance to their borrowing EMDEs less of a barrier than that of other EMDE banks and more like U.S. or European banks. While bilateral trade, FDI, and portfolio investment...
It seems necessary that one gains some deeper understanding of the sources of China’s phenomenal economic growth. Apart from all well-founded extant explanations, my recent book Guaranteed Bubble argues for another important yet previously overlooked source: the guarantees provided by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government has been using various subsidies to encourage innovations by Chinese firms. We examine the allocation and impacts of innovation subsidies, using the data from the China Employer Employee Survey (CEES). We find that the innovation subsidies are preferentially allocated to state-owned firms and politically connected firms...