This dissertation consists of three essays on incentives and Chinese economic reform. In the first essay, I collect a unique dataset of Chinese municipalities from 1978 to 2007 to evaluate the impact of a Special Economic Zone experiment with incentives including property rights protection, tax breaks and a preferential land policy for foreign investors. Guided by a theoretical model, I find the SEZ policy: 1) increases per capita foreign direct investment by 58%; 2) does not crowd out domestic investment and 3) increases TFP growth rate by 0.6 percentage points. The results suggest that SEZs not only bring capital, but also more advanced technology. In the second essay, I evaluate the fiscal incentive - the marginal sharing rate of fiscal revenue faced by Chinese provincial governments. In 1994, China engaged in a fiscal reform which set marginal sharing rates of budgetary taxes across provinces to a uniform level. Exploiting heterogeneity in the pre-reform budgetary sharing rate, I find that provinces with lower pre-existing rates collect more budgetary taxes; at the same time less extra-budgetary revenue after 1994 relative to those with higher starting level. The results suggest that Chinese provincial governments treat the budgetary tax and extra-budgetary revenue as substitutes. The third essay studies the impact of Chinese municipal governments' fiscal sharing rate on the local economy. The fiscal regime change in 2002 largely reduced the local sharing rate of enterprise income tax. I find that municipal governments respond to this change by allocating more resources including land and capital into the real estate sector, leading to social conflicts between local governments and farmers whose lands were taken with low compensation. The results imply that regional decentralization has to be matched with well-designed incentives to benefit the majority of the population within the jurisdictions.

This thesis investigates the impact of the various institutional changes which have occurred in the Chinese labour market in recent years, against the background of the rapid transition to a market economy. One aspect of interest is the accessibility of the job market to graduates. This aspect is investigated using survey data on job search. Institutional factors, particularly hukou policy, are found to exert a strong influence on graduates’ job search behaviour and outcomes. Specifically, graduates from rural areas, classified as non-urban hukou, choose to invest in higher levels of job-search effort and appear to have higher probabilities of being employed. This evidence is reassuring in the sense that effort invested in job search appears to be beneficial in the graduate labour market in China. The second aspect of interest is compensation arrangements within private organizational settings. This aspect is investigated using personnel records (from 1994 through 2007) from one typical domestic privately-owned firm. Analysis of this data reveals the following: a tertiary education background increases a worker’s earnings by more than 30% compared with one having only primary education; Guanxi (personal connections) typically increases earnings by around 16%; tenure is a decisive determinant of whether an individual receives a deferred compensation package; finally, local hukou status exerts absolute advantage in terms of both salary and the propensity to receive a deferred compensation package. The third and final aspect is determination of job tenure in the private sector. Using data from the same firm as investigated in the previous chapter of the thesis. Single-spell and multiple-spell duration analyses are applied to model the employment durations of these workers. We find that migrant workers exhibit a higher rate of turnover. This is despite the implementation of significant hukou reform in our study region which allows migrant workers to apply for local hukou status. We argue that this is partly due to employers continuing to discriminate against migrant workers in terms of compensation.

No description available.

The scale and significance of the rise of China is now widely recognised and a burgeoning literature engages with the developmental impacts of Chinese relationships with the rest of the global South across topics such as investment, loans, aid, human rights and migration. All are significant, but most of this work addresses specific states or regions and concentrates on direct, bilateral interactions between these locations and the People's Republic. In contrast, this thesis adopts a world-historical perspective that conceptualises China's rise as transforming some of the central accumulation processes which power global capitalism, producing profound consequences for those states whose developmental prospects depend upon the functioning of these circuits. The principal argument is that during the period 2003-14, such China-driven disruption, particularly to the structures of commodity markets, positively influenced the circumstances of insertion into the global economy for dozens highly-indebted Southern natural resource-exporting states. This shift provided such states with the economic wherewithal to define their own development strategies, free of external neoliberal constraints, for the first time in a generation. I make two main claims: {i} a high export concentration in hard/energy commodities demanded by China is a necessary condition for departure from a neoliberalising trajectory in a given southern state; and {ii} whether such a departure occurs and the direction it takes then depends upon the nature of domestic class configurations in each case. I use Qualitative Comparative Analysis with a set of 25 country cases in support of the first claim. For the second, I present a typology of political-economic trajectories among resource exporting states under commodity boom conditions, building upon periods of fieldwork in Ecuador, Zambia and Jamaica to identify five distinct ideo-typical resource-based development agendas.

In China, the significant economic development in recent years now provides one of the biggest construction markets in the world. Therefore gaining competitive advantage has become the concern of construction contractors who want to be perceived as superior to their rivals. This need is particularly urgent for the many non-state construction contractors (NSCCs) who are relatively less competitive. However, neither theories nor techniques are directly available to help NSCCs in developing their competitive advantages. This research produced a framework to illustrate the sources of competitive advantage for NSCCs as well as the relationship among those sources and to guide NSCCs in mainland China to develop their competitive advantages. The literature review explored theories of competitive advantage and strategic models to explain patterns, motivations and performances of business activities and the existing theories and theoretical frameworks. Existing theories were found to not be sufficient to investigate all sources of competitive advantage for NSCCs in the complex Chinese market. This is because most theories are based on an open market, whereas China is not a completely market oriented country yet. Interview and questionnaire Survey were then employed to field investigations. A conceptual framework was developed prior to the data collection. By comparing empirical findings and existing theories, the conceptual framework was modified and enriched. The final framework was produced to illustrate sources of competitive advantage for NSCCs and the determinants of these sources in the Chinese construction market. As the empirical findings indicated, unlike conventional theories built upon open market competition, this research highlighted the existence of institutional factors in the market which affect the business environment and a firm 's sources of competitive advantage as a result of China's on-going reform. In the final framework, the two well established schools of thought, Porter's theories and RBV (Resource Based View) approaches are both indispensible when developing competitive advantages for NSCCs. The interactions between them are continued under the impact of the institution forces in the construction market in China. This research has concluded that institution forces (including guanxi issues) together with strategic choices as well as firm resources and competencies determine the sources of competitive advantages of NSCCs in China.

No description available.

In June 2015, legal frameworks of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank were signed by its 57 founding members. Proposed and initiated by China, this multilateral development bank is considered to be an Asian counterpart to break the monopoly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2015, China’s Central Bank announced a benchmark interest rate cut to combat the economic slowdown. The easing policy coincides with the European Central Bank’s announcement of doubts over US Fed’s commitment to raise interest rates. Global stock markets responded positively to China’s move, with the exception of the indexes from Wall Street (Bland, 2015; Elliott, 2015). In the meantime, China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (or New Silk Road Economic Belt) became atopic of discourse in relation to its growing global economy, as China pledged $40 billion to trade and infrastructure projects (Bermingham, 2015). The foreign policy aims to reinforce the economic belt from western China through Central Asia towards Europe, as well as to construct maritime trading routes from coastal China through the South China Sea (Summers, 2015). In 2012, The Economist launched a new China section, to reveal the complexity of the‘meteoric rise’ of China. John Micklethwait, who was then the chief editor of the magazine, said that China’s emergence as a global power justified giving it a section of its own(Roush, 2012). In July 2015, Hu Shuli, the former chief editor of Caijing, announced the launch of a think tank and financial data service division called Caixin Insight Group, which encompasses the new Caixin China Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). Incooperation with with Markit Group, a principal global provider of PMI, the index soon became a widely cited economic indicator. One anecdote from November’s Caixin shows how much has changed: in a high-profile dialogue between Hu Shuli and Kevin Rudd, Hu insisted on asking questions in English; interestingly, the former Prime Minister of Australia insisted on replying in Chinese. These recent developments point to one thing: the economic ascent of China and its increasing influence on the power play between economics and politics in world markets. China has begun to take a more active role in rule making and enforcement under neoliberal frameworks. However, due to the country’s size and the scale of its economy in comparison to other countries, China’s version of globalisation has unique characteristics. The ‘Capitalist-socialist’ paradox is vital to China’s market-oriented transformation. In order to comprehend how such unique features are articulated and understood, there are several questions worth investigating in the realms of media and communication studies,such as how China’s neoliberal restructuring is portrayed and perceived by different types of interested parties, and how these portrayals are de-contextualised and re-contextualised in global or Anglo-American narratives. Therefore, based on a combination of the themes of globalisation, financial media and China’s economic integration, this thesis attempts to explore how financial media construct the narratives of China’s economic globalisation through the deployment of comparative and multi-disciplinary approaches. Two outstanding elite financial magazines, Britain’s The Economist, which has a global readership and influence, and Caijing, China’s leading financial magazine, are chosen as case studies to exemplify differing media discourses, representing, respectively, Anglo-American and Chinese socio-economic and political backgrounds, as well as their own journalistic cultures. This thesis tries to answer the questions of how and why China’s neoliberal restructuring is constructed from a globally-oriented perspective. The construction primarily involves people who are influential in business and policymaking. Hence, the analysis falls into the paradigm of elite-elite communication, which is an important but relatively less developed perspective in studying China and its globalisation. The comparing of characteristics of narrative construction are the result of the textual analysis of articles published over a ten-year period (mid-1998 to mid-2008). The corpus of samples come from the two media outlets’ coverage of three selected events:China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, its outward direct investment, and the listing of stocks of Chinese companies in overseas exchanges, which are mutually exclusive in sample collection and collectively exhaustive in the inclusion of articles regarding China’s economic globalisation. The findings help to understand that, despite language, socio-economic and political differences, elite financial media with globally-oriented readerships share similar methods of and approaches to agenda setting, the evaluation of news prominence, the selection of frame, and the advocacy of deeply rooted neoliberal ideas. The comparison of their distinctive features reflects the different phases of building up the sense of identity in their readers as global elites, as well as the different economic interests that are aligned with the corresponding readerships. However, textual analysis is only relevant in terms of exploring how the narratives are constructed and the elements they include; textual analysis alone prevents us from seeing the obstacles and the constrains of the journalistic practices of construction. Therefore, this thesis provides a brief discussion of interviews with practitioners from the two media, in order to understand how similar or different narratives are manifested and perceived, how the concept of neoliberalism deviates from and is justified in the Chinese context, and how and for what purpose deviations arise from Western to Chinese contexts. The thesis also contributes to defining financial media in the domain of elite communication. The relevant and closely interlocking concepts of globalisation, elitism and neoliberalism are discussed, and are used as a theoretical bedrock in the analysis of texts and contexts. It is important to address the agenda-setting and ideological role of elite financial media, because of its narrative formula of infusing business facts with opinions,which is important in constructing the global elite identity as well as influencing neoliberal policy-making. On the other hand, ‘journalistic professionalism’ has been redefined, in that the elite identity is shared by the content producer, reader and the actors in the news stories emerging from the much-compressed news cycle. The professionalism of elite financial media requires a dual definition, that of being professional in the understanding of business facts and statistics, and that of being professional in the making sense of stories by deploying economic logic.

No description available.

Cette thèse interroge le rôle de la responsabilité sociale des entreprises (RSE) dans l’évolution des conditions de travail et, plus largement, dans la dynamique de la forme du rapport salarial dans l’industrie chinoise exportatrice. La RSE est appréhendée dans une perspective institutionnaliste et replacée dans le contexte de transition de la Chine vers un système capitaliste. Depuis les années 2000, le durcissement des luttes sociales dans l’industrie incite les pouvoirs publics à élaborer des institutions plus protectrices des travailleurs. La RSE peut ainsi être appréhendée dans le prolongement de l’objectif gouvernemental de construction d’un compromis social plus favorable aux travailleurs. Nous dégageons trois types d’approches de la RSE. Chaque idéal-type est par la suite examiné au prisme d’un modèle d’analyse en termes de "potentiel régulatoire", visant à étudier la capacité de normes privées à influer sur les règles au sein des entreprises, et plus largement sur les institutions du rapport salarial. Nous montrons que l’approche "mise en conformité", la plus répandue dans l’industrie chinoise, a très largement échoué à modifier les comportements et tend à reproduire la domination des firmes multinationales dans les chaînes globales de valeur. Deux types de dispositifs moins répandus s’insèrent davantage dans les problématiques rencontrées par les acteurs. L’approche "experte" associe l’amélioration des conditions de travail à l’optimisation de l’organisation productive. Enfin, des "ONG" de défense des travailleurs du sud de la Chine et de Hong Kong développent des dispositifs de RSE « participative », visant à établir des mécanismes de négociation collective dans les ateliers. / This thesis questions the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the evolution of working conditions and, more broadly, in the transformation of the wage-labour nexus in the Chinese industry relying massively on cheap workforce. We use an institutionalist framework to put CSR in the Chinese context of transition from a socialist to a capitalist system, showing that during the last decade, rising pressure from Chinese workers has convinced the Chinese government that institutions more protective of workers should be created. We differentiate three approaches to CSR, based on the intentions of the actors and on the instruments implemented. We examine the capacity of each approach to influence labour relations within the factories, and more broadly, to contribute to the construction of a new social compromise. We show that the "compliance" approach, the most widespread in the Chinese industry, has largely failed to improve working conditions, and tends instead to reproduce the buying practices of multinational corporations in global value chains. We are also interested in two types of instruments that are less common, but closer to the concerns of the Chinese industry. The "expertise" approach developed by consulting companies, but also by the government and by the International Labour Office, combines the objective of improving working conditions to the optimisation of production. Finally, some labour "NGOs" from Hong Kong and the Guangdong province are developing programs of "participatory" CSR, aiming at establishing collective bargaining mechanisms within factories, thus bypassing some of the political obstacles to their activities.

This thesis contains one literature review chapter and three self-contained empirical studies on different but closely related topics, domestic market integration, public spending, and strategic interactions in China. In Chapter 1, we describe the general background of the Chinese fiscal reforms in the 1980s. In particular we present how the open-door policies has resulted in China’s increasing participation in the global market while at the same time its domestic market seem to still suffer from prevalent border effects and local protectionism. Besides, we outline the nature and source of this fragmentation, which stems from the fiscal and administrative decentralisation, that the fiscal reforms brought about, and the existing political system. As such the fiscal and administrative system give strong incentives for local governments to actively participate in yardstick competition, which often takes the form of the so-called ‘tournament competition‘. Chapter 2 provides a general overview of the existing literature on measuring domestic market integration (DMI). It provides the theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence of this literature, organising DMI into three main streams of the literature, which are factor-related approach, price-related approach and output and employment-related approach. Chapter 3 adopts a spatial border difference approach and a spatial border econometric approach to estimate the provincial border effects and thus infer the degree of domestic market integration in China. By using a dataset of 48 border counties and 28 2-digit industries in the Yangtze River Delta region over the time period 2005-2009, we find that border effects are present and significant and also varying across provinces and industries. On average Shanghai shows the highest level of local protectionism with its provincial border exerting greater influences on the industry patterns compared with the other two provinces. We also observe the provincial border effects are decreasing over time, albeit over a short time period, which indicates an ongoing process of deepening market integration. Moreover, we also find that Jiangsu exhibits a higher level of border effects against Shanghai and Zhejiang than that with its all surrounding neighbours. Chapter 4 looks into the role of domestic market integration and socio-economic globalisation play in the size and structure of the public sector in China. By employing a dataset of 27 Chinese provinces for the period of 1998-2006, we find that domestic market integration has negligible effects, only showing a small positive correlation with social aspects of spending. On the other hand, the results of international integration provide some support for the ‘efficiency’ hypothesis over the ‘compensation’ view. More specifically, economic integration contributes to the overall expansion of public sector and in particular it increases productive and non-social spending, while social integration results in a reduction in total spending and social spending. Chapter 5 investigates the relationship between strategic interactions and political tournament competition in China. By using the provincial-level data for 28 Chinese provinces over the period of 1998-2005, we provide strong evidence of the spatial autocorrelation in both total spending and its components, though we fail to find evidence supporting the ‘tournament competition’. Besides, the spending level in neighbouring provinces acts as a constraining effect on a local leader’s promotion. Moreover, we found that a higher level of total spending, productive spending and education spending compared with their contiguity neighbours, and a higher level of agriculture spending compared with their GDP-related neighbours would significantly increase the promotion opportunities of provincial governors. In contrast, the level of administration spending relative to local province’s GDP-related neighbours and the level of agency spending relative to geographic-related neighbours are negatively linked with the political turnover rate of provincial governors. Chapter 6 summarises the main findings of the thesis and outline the policy implications of our findings.