This research examines the form of economic insecurity generated in China in recent years, and how the state’s response to this can be characterised, particularly focusing on how the problem is addressed at the local level. The research begins with a broad discussion explaining the background and reviewing the existing literature on economic security in a global context. It then takes a broad look at the general economic security context and related literature in China. It found that China is shifting away from the old types of economic and social structure, which are merging into a new system. However, during the transition period, neoliberalism has influenced the welfare system in China, and welfare provision by the state has been dramatically reduced. This thesis further explores and examines the characteristics of recent social security system reforms in China by exploring developments in both the social and economic systems from a historical perspective. It argues that social security should not only aim to prevent and alleviate poverty, but should also take into account a wider perspective that accepts that all citizens, not only those who are impoverished, need a certain degree of security. A case study was undertaken based on data from interviews and a questionnaire collected in a local secondary city in China. The thesis makes an important contribution to the study of welfare policy development and implementation in China. It finds that one of the main reasons for economic insecurity is China’s welfare development contains a large degree of informality. This informality not only generates economic insecurity in the labour market, but also in the way government institutions provide services. Local government has failed to take enough responsibility for implementing social policies and guaranteeing basic income security. Based on the discussions of welfare state models in Esping-Andersen (1996, 1999) and Ringen and Ngok (2013) merged with the characteristics of social development in China, this study also proposes a new dimension for the classification of the welfare state in China as a decentralised socialist-market liberal-conservative welfare model.

This PhD thesis employs and further develops the current input-output techniques from different approaches to explore the opportunities for quantitative research on sustainable development in developing countries, particularly applied to the case of the fastest growing economy - China. China's economic success can be confirmed by showing a continuous annual Gross Domestic Production growth rate of over 8% since 1980; being the world's fourth strongest economy since 2005 and the second largest exporter in 2006. China's economic structure has been transformed from agricultural to industrial based while the tertiary sectors are gaining increasing importance. Much of China's population has been experiencing a transition from poverty to adequate food and clothes, and a growing part of populations are changing to "western lifestyles". The economic reform also creates unbalanced regional development, which has resulted in significant income gaps between rural and urban areas, coastal and interior China. All these developments have left deep marks on China's environment. On the other hand, deteriorated eco-systems have the potential to affect the continuity of development and in some regions, as for example North China. This thesis investigates the interrelationships and interactions between the economy and the environment in order to identify the major drivers of environmental degradation for the fast developing economies in the "South". Chapter 4 designs a hydro-economic accounting framework to demonstrate how water has been involved in production, then discharged to the natural environment with degraded quality and its impacts to the regional hydro-systems. By applying the framework to North China which is characterised as water scarce, the water demand was 96% of its annual available water resources, mostly for the water and emission intensive sectors. Chapter 5 takes a different angel by assessing virtual water flows between North and South China. It uses international trade theory as a starting point to address its inability to treat natural resources properly as a factor of production. Both Chapters 4 and 5 suggest that it is important 'to design' an economic structure as well as trade patterns at the beginning of industrialisation process, especially for newly industrializing countries in the "south", from the perspective of sustainable development. Chapter 6 conducts an IPAT-IO structural decomposition analysis on China's C02 emission to picture a race between consumption growth and technology improvements over the past 20 years. It also points out that it is vital to establish policies to switch westernising consumption trend to more sustainable consumption patterns to reduce C02 emissions. This might be the case for many other developing countries as well.

Bibliography: leaves 141-159. / vii, 159 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Economics, 1996

This thesis responds to the development policy debate on whether the popular Beijing Consensus is an alternative, especially for developing countries, to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies. The advocates of the Beijing Consensus have overlooked the facts that China’s development model has much in common with the Washington Consensus, China has profited from the globalisation, and the reform for establishing a market-oriented economy is the key factor of the rapid development and outstanding achievements in China. The critics have reluctantly acknowledged the successful strategies employed by the policy makers in Beijing, however, they branded China as an authoritarian country, and are wilfully or unintentionally blind to the diversity, inclusiveness and competitiveness in the ‘quasi-nonpartisan’ Chinese political system. This thesis explain how a farsighted government can increase long-run growth by fiscal policies, why free market and the ambitious government are not contradictory in China, and why so many ‘democratic’ countries violate the first two prescriptions of the Washington Consensus: fiscal discipline, and public expenditure priority to pro-growth investment. The theoretical analyses show that the strategy of a farsighted government is to sacrifice the first several generations but benefit all future generations through cutting nonproductive public spending and giving expenditure priority to productivity-enhancing expenditure, so that a higher growth rate leads to a ‘quasi-Pareto improvement’ among generations. Nevertheless, farsighted fiscal policy together with ‘hedonistic citizens’ has a side effect, the welfare loss for both the government and the citizens. The Barro model is an exception in which a farsighted government has no place to increase the growth rate because welfare maximisation equals growth maximisation. The empirical results reveal the strong substitution relationship between the government and nongovernment capital, and thus the general CES technology rather than the Cobb-Douglas technology is the suitable structure containing the two types of capital in the production function. However, the government capital has become more complementary to the nongovernment capital due to the deepening reforms of SOEs and fiscal policies since 1992.

This thesis is a collection of three essays studying firms in low income countries. The first chapter explores how relational contracts that substitute for formal contracts in the presence of weak institutions, are affected by changes to the outside option of one of the parties. I investigate this question by assessing how a change in the pay-off of cultivating an alternative crop by farmers affects the relationship with downstream buyers in the sugar industry in colonial Taiwan (1895-1945). Using novel historic sugar mill level data, I analyse effects on interlinked lending and the provision of inputs by mills to farmers following a reversal of the downward price trend of the main alternative crop, rice. In the second chapter, which is co-authored with Anna Baiardi, we empirically assess the importance of ethnic networks in facilitating international trade. In particular, we investigate the impact of ethnic Cantonese networks in the United States on the export performance of firms based in Southern China. In the third chapter, I investigate whether the dominance of small firms in developing countries can be explained by the production of customised goods, which allows smaller and less efficient firms to compete with larger and more efficient modern firms. I incorporate this hypothesis in a model, in which the key variables impacting the profitability of the customised technology and thus firm size are transport costs and income.

To address the research questions - How has the Chinese government been able to produce a successful reform process and what logic has been behind it? - I develop a politico-economic framework that is largely based on a public choice model by Frey and Eichenberger (1992) and a politico-economic research methodology by Bates and Kreuger (1993). Its basic assumption is that all individuals, including bureaucrats and autocrats, maximise their own power and money subject to constraints. Secondly, it assumes that, when a new leadership rises to power, it will try to start an economic reform process in order to secure its power position. Per reform period, economic reform plans are analysed on their intended effect, implementation and actual results in pure economic terms as well as in political terms (leadership's power position). The framework hypothesises that during a reform process a government will perform a constant balancing act between the political viability with the economic rationality of each individual reform measure. This hypothesis is testedJand the Chinese reform period 1978-1995. The constraints Deng Xiaoping's leadership faces are the Communist Party's rule, a very strong bureaucracy, management of state enterprises and military, the command economy with an agricultural commune system and a revenue dependency on state owned enterprises. The hypothesis largely holds for China: agricultural reforms start with liberalisation to be later on largely retracted; real state owned enterprise reforms are never implemented; rural industrial reforms boom after tax revenues could be withheld at local level; the military's civilian industries is thriving. Unwanted results are quickly changed or retracted in the following period. Also identified is that despite these efforts, unintended interlinkage effects between the different reform measures become increasingly important and difficult to assess, resulting in a great loss of power for the leadership.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters on development economics and Chinese economy. The first chapter examines how centralization affects regional development. I draw upon plausibly exogenous variations in centralization from a political hierarchy reform in China to investigate it in a novel sub-provincial setting. I show that centralization has positive and significant effects on the overall industrial output and urban population of regions. To understand the mechanism, I propose a theoretical framework, where centralization will help to reduce resource misallocation within a region and improve aggregate productivity. Consistent with it, my analysis of industrial firm-level data reveals a reduction in the dispersion of marginal products after centralization, and I quantify the productivity gains from centralization in a counterfactual analysis. In addition to the positive overall effects on regions, the reform also has distributional effects for the different counties that constitute the region. The second chapter evaluates a firm-based pollution regulation in China in 2007 to investigate the relationship between political incentives and effects of environmental regulations. I show that when a municipality Party secretary has more incentives to improve the local economy for promotion, measured by his age, adverse impacts in employment and output on regulated firms will be much larger. At the same time, loss in regulated firms will be associated with gains in other unregulated firms in polluting industries, and there is no overall effects in manufacturing activities on polluting industries. I find that emissions of pollutants in municipalities with high incentive leaders experience a significant reduction. The third chapter estimates the effects of children genders on parents’ time allocation due to the long-existing son preference in developing countries. Using household survey data in China from 1989 to 2009, I show that with more sons instead of daughters, both father’s and mother’s time on housework will rise. At the same time men will increase their working time on labour markets and women can enjoy more leisure on the contrary. For possible endogeneity in children’s gender, I exploit exogenous variations from a law to forbid the use of ultrasound-B to reveal fetus gender.

This thesis is intended to contribute to the discussion on China’s socio-economic development during the post-socialist period of reform and opening up. It is aimed at providing an explanation of the Chinese contemporary development trajectory, by establishing an institutional and policy model, which China is believed to have been following. This model is also believed to offer some general solutions to the underdeveloped countries in systemic transformation. The thesis argues that China’s post-socialist development trajectory has been determined by the provisions of the Developmental State (DS) model, as far as state development policies, state ideology, and state institutional arrangements are concerned, and to the extent, that China has become a genus of the Post-Socialist Developmental State (PSDS) model – this model being an alternative to the post-socialist neoliberalism. In the course of scholarly enquiry, China’s development trajectory is analysed against the paths of historical developmental states, and against the general and developmental aspects of the process of post-socialist transformation. I start by analysing the features of the historical developmental states and by investigating whether the provisions of the DS model are viable contemporarily and how the model extends to the discussion on China’s development. I then examine China’s post-socialist transformation, partly in its DS context. Next, I analyse the features of China’s development trajectory in comparison with the features of historical developmental states, as far as ideology and political and economic arrangements as well as state development policies are concerned. Finally, based on the previous analyses, I explain the DS-determined postsocialist development trajectory of China, address the causal relation between the DS institutionalisation and post-socialist transformation, and construct the PSDS model, as a general guideline for states in transition.

This thesis engages with a debate in the literature on the political economy of China’s industrial reforms about the determinants of major policy trajectories in that country’s strategic industries. A common approach understands central-level policy processes and their structural outcomes in strategic sectors to be subject to active and effective central government guidance, often applied via control over state-owned industry. A less common perspective, on the other hand, has argued that policy formulation and implementation in a number of strategic industries are often dominated by large central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) capable of imposing their own preferences on sectoral policy. Addressing these partially opposing perspectives, this thesis analyses political processes underlying major policy developments in China’s electricity supply industry since 2002, finding that neither approach sufficiently accounts for the complexity of interactions between government and SOEs during the formulation and implementation of sectoral policy. ‘Government-centred’ accounts were found to have exaggerated the effectiveness of central government’s policy guidance while underappreciating SOEs’ considerable sectoral policy impact. ‘SOE-centred’ accounts, on the other hand, have similarly overstated their claims while furthermore giving a distorted perspective of the mechanisms through which SOEs’ policy influence occurs. Building on findings from the case of electricity supply, this thesis establishes an alternative account of the political interplay between both sides and its relevance for sectoral policy-making in China’s strategic industries. It illustrates that central SOEs autonomously pursue their own industrial reform agendas which often deviate from government’s sectoral preferences and from existing sectoral policy. However, it contends that these firms are only able to realise contentious sectoral objectives by tactically ‘synchronising’ them with cross-sectoral policy agendas pursued by central government. When sectoral reform goals diverge and ‘synchronisation’ is absent, policy gridlock often ensues. Overall, this thesis finds that central government’s sectoral guidance over strategic industries is subject to substantial interference by central SOEs, but that this interference largely takes place within the confines of government-sanctioned cross-sectoral policy.

This thesis examines qiaowu [Overseas Chinese affairs] policies during the PRC’s first decade, and it argues that the CCP-controlled party-state’s approach to the governance of the huaqiao [Overseas Chinese] and their affairs was fundamentally a political economy. This was at base, a function of perceived huaqiao economic utility, especially for what their remittances offered to China’s foreign reserves, and hence the party-state’s qiaowu approach was a political practice to secure that economic utility. Through the early-to-mid-1950s, the perceived economic utility of the huaqiao and their remittancesled to policies that systematically privileged the huaqiao (especially in China) and their interests, all in the name of securing, incentivising and increasing remittances back to China. This was even done at the expense of other CCP ideological impetuses, especially in terms of socialist transformation, as the party-state permitted contradictions between these youdai [favourable treatment] policies for the huaqiao, and its own vision for socialist transformation. Yet, by 1959, and after a series of crises brought the contradictions between qiaowu and socialist transformation to the fore, the CCP’s radical shift to the left led by Mao Zedong forced qiaowu to now conform with Mao’s demand to place ‘politics in command’. Thus qiaowu abandoned its prioritisation of economic utility and its past policies, for alignment with Mao’s revolutionary ideals, and in service to the Great Leap Forward. This thesis represents an original contribution to historiography on the PRC, the huaqiao, and qiaowu, both in terms of the new evidence from a wide range of Chinese archives that it utilises, but also because it revises existing narratives—and especially the pro-CCP conventionalisms—that gloss over the huaqiao experience of New China. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the lacunae in the historiography on the PRC in the 1950s, and its silence on where qiaowu fits into the story of China’s socialist transformation.