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.
We conduct a novel systematic textual analysis of the discussion in the quarterly reports of China fund managers, from which we infer their near-term expectations for Chinese monetary policy. We show that this aggregate index of manager expectations performs well as a forecast of Chinese monetary policy, that fund managers act on these expectations, and that correctly anticipating shifts in policy improves fund...
The digital economy is growing rapidly across the globe and, among developing countries, the PRC is a leader. Despite its promise, the global digital economy also poses many challenges, including tax base erosion and profit shifting. Given the initial efforts by the PRC to address these challenges, this post recommends that the country continues...
Trade disputes between the United States and China greatly intensified recently as the two countries announced a 25 percent tariff hike on $50 billion worth of products imported from each other, raising the risk of a trade war between the two giant trading economies. Based on a standard multi-sector, multi-country general equilibrium trade model with input-output linkages, we evaluate the cost of a trade war in which the United States and China both increase their tariffs to 45% for all imports from each other. We find that the United States would be more likely to be the bigger loser and that the cost for China would be moderate.
That China, one of the lowest income countries in the world at the turn of the 21st century, became a super-power in scientific knowledge in less than two decades is a remarkable development in the history of science. The way China deploys its newly developed scientific resources will drive the direction of science and technology into the foreseeable future and the direction of our increasingly knowledge-based economy.