Since the 1980s, girls’ educational attaintment increased more quickly than boys’. As a result, the gender education gap decreased and even reversed in China. How does the gender earnings gap change in the face of increasing female human capital? What are the implications for the Chinese gender earnings gap in the future? This column will shed light on this interesting topic within and across cohorts.
This article discusses that the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) implemented in China from 2003 to 2008 significantly reduced mortality rates among rural residents and greatly enhanced national health outcomes, serving as a model for developing countries in achieving universal health coverage.
In this paper, we find that the introduction of specialized bankruptcy courts, which are run by better-trained judges and subject to less government intervention, reduces the cost of bond financing by around 10%.
China is aiming to become a technological innovation powerhouse by 2050, with Premier Li Keqiang recently announcing an increase in R&D investments by 7% for the next five years. But greater R&D investment is no guarantee of success. This column examines the effects of R&D investments by Chinese firms on aggregate productivity and growth.
We find that capital import has a substantially larger productivity effect than intermediates import, by generating significant long-term productivity gains through R&D-capital synergy, R&D-inducing, and direct dynamic productivity effects. Our findings highlight the importance of tariff structure in tariff liberalization: the change in tariff structure explains 18% of the productivity gains following China’s WTO accession.