Since its inception in the early 1980s, the success of China's enterprise reforms remains hotly debated. This paper introduces a new element into the analysis of state-owned enterprise performance by drawing on the recent increase in interregional income disparities. It is argued that as a...

Agricultural production outsourcing, a new means of agricultural production, can optimise the allocation of resources, reduce agricultural production costs, and improve agricultural productivity. However, farmers' outsourcing behaviours are strongly interfered with by many factors such as...

Why are we rich and others poor? What is preventing the less-developed countries from catching up with the more developed? How did we become rich? Underlying these questions are more fundamental ones: What is the nature of economic progress? What are its causes? I seek the answers to these...

This paper presents theory and evidence from highly disaggregated Chinese data that tighter credit constrains force firms to produce lower quality. The paper modifies Melitz's (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms by introducing quality choice and credit constraints. The quality sorting...

Using firm-level data from a 2009 survey conducted in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China, this paper examines impacts of technology capacity and value-chain position on firm's product competitiveness. Both technology capacity and product competitiveness are self-assessed relative to other...

As China is moving toward an innovation-driven economy, this paper offers new insights for both policymakers and investors to optimize the effectiveness of investment performance. This paper studies China's provincial research activities with a focus on the spillover-induced productivity and...

China is one of the largest consumers of energy globally. The country also emits some of the highest levels of CO2 globally. In 2009, 18% of the world's total energy was consumed in China and the growth rate of energy consumption in China is 6.4% per year. In recent years, the Chinese government...

Performance contracts (PCs) - contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers - have been used widely in developing countries. China's experience with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands of...

This paper presents theory and evidence that tighter credit constrains force firms to produce lower quality. The paper develops a quality sorting model that predicts that tighter credit constraints faced by a firm reduce its optimal prices due to its choice of lower-quality products. Conversely,...

This paper presents theory and evidence from highly disaggregated Chinese data that tighter credit constrains force firms to produce lower quality. The paper modifies Melitz's (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms by introducing quality choice and credit constraints. The quality sorting...