The article discusses how capital accumulation has driven China's transition towards capital-intensive industries, while labor-biased productivity growth has helped China maintain a competitive edge in labor-intensive sectors.
Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.
The Chinese government has been using strong fiscal stimuli to encourage investment. While these fiscal policies, such as investment tax credits, often encourage firm investment, we find that investment tax incentives may generate an unintended reduction of firms’ innovation. Moreover, the crowding-out effect is non-monotonic in the level of financial constraints.
We apply the discontinuity methodology from the accounting literature to a political economy setting of GDP reporting and examine whether Chinese local governments manage regional GDP numbers. We find strong evidence of discontinuities around zero in the distribution of actual minus target GDP growth rates. The frequencies of just meeting or beating GDP growth targets are about five (four) times the frequencies of just missing targets at the prefecture (province) level. The results are stronger for governors with longer tenures and those without political connections to higher-level officials as well as for local governments with more resources under their control.
The US-China trade war—the unprecedented tit-for-tat increase in tariffs by the US and China—provided a unique laboratory to study and understand how changes in trade policy can redistribute the gains from trade. I argue that the trade war induced concentrated losses in consumption and employment for American communities most exposed to Chinese retaliatory tariffs.