University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Economics

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Griffith University, 1998. / Restricted until 9th December, 1999. Digital copy of the author's original dissertation. Title taken from PDF title screen (viewed July 1, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation studies China's first industrializing efforts to transform its navigation, cotton textiles and banking in the late nineteenth century, and analyzes the paradoxical roles of the state and culture in achieving development. It argues that successful late development is dependent on state policies that emphasize state-society connectedness and tradition-modernity continuity. In late Qing China, the state-midwifed industrial projects faced both intensive competition from foreign firms and resistance from domestic vested interests. Because key resource factors such as capital, production technology, and management skill were scarce and distributed unevenly across multiple sectors, the state officials had to redirect the resource flows in order to found new industries. The state had to perform an essential function of creative destruction, without which social groups in non-state sectors would be less likely to embrace changes, but the ultimate success of new industries depended on a societal consolidation that redefined the state-society relationship. This study also shows that culture was a double-edged sword with great potential for lubricating industrial transformation. The promoters of development created myths, symbols and beliefs to legitimize their industrializing efforts. They made a constant effort to reinterpret tradition in order to find compatibility between the foreign and domestic systems. The distinctive sectoral paths taken by navigation, cotton textiles and banking represented different patterns of state-society cooperation for achieving development. Each sector had distinct production technologies and product structure, and was endowed with distinct sectoral institutions and other legacies. These endowments constrained choices of every new industry, but it was a combination of structural factors and industry's responsive strategies that explained why some enterprises succeeded while others failed. A project was more likely to succeed if there was greater state-society connectedness and cultural compatibility. Steam navigation was the most successful among the three, followed by cotton textiles. Banking was the least successful.

published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / China Development Studies / Master / Master of Arts in China Development Studies

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Master / Master of Economics

by Wong Kwok Choi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-67). / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- Rural Reforms in China after 1978 and the Regional Development of Rural Enterprises --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1. --- Historical Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2. --- China's Rural Enterprises and Regional Development --- p.9 / Chapter 2.3. --- Description of the Regions Included in the Study --- p.13 / Chapter 3. --- Rural Income Inequality in China after 1978: A Brief Literature Review --- p.21 / Chapter 4. --- The Methodology and Data --- p.27 / Chapter 4.1. --- The Generalized Entropy Measures --- p.27 / Chapter 4.2. --- Inequality Decomposition by Factor Components --- p.29 / Chapter 4.3. --- Extension of Shorrocks´ة Decomposition Rule --- p.33 / Chapter 4.4. --- An Asymptotically Distribution-Free Test for Inequality Index and its Decomposed Components --- p.35 / Chapter 4.5. --- The Data --- p.36 / Chapter 5. --- Empirical Results and Policy Implications --- p.39 / Chapter 5.1.a. --- "Rural Income Inequality Trends for Shanxi, Guangdong and Gansu Derived from County-Level Data" --- p.40 / Chapter 5.l.b. --- "Factor Decomposition Analyses for Shanxi, Guangdong and Gansu Using County-Level Data" --- p.41 / Chapter 5.1.c. --- "Between- and Within-Province Factor Decomposition Analysis Using Pooled County-Level Data for Shanxi, Guangdong and Gansu" --- p.47 / Chapter 5.1.d. --- Between- and Within-County Factor Decomposition Analysis Using Township and Village Level Data for Shanxi --- p.49 / Chapter 5.2. --- Discussion and Policy Implications --- p.53 / Chapter 6. --- Summary --- p.58 / REFERENCES --- p.63 / APPENDIX / Chapter 1. --- Derivation of the Extended Shorrocks' Decomposition Rule --- p.68 / Chapter 2. --- Derivation of the Asymptotic Distributions of Inequality Index and Its Decomposed Components --- p.69 / Chapter 3. --- The Double Counting Problem of GVO and GVI --- p.84 / Chapter 4. --- The Data Set --- p.87 / TABLES / FIGURES

What are the factors behind the recent development of industrial technology in China? Does China follow the path of learning technology from outside through direct foreign investment and international trade as other Asian newly industrialized economies, or imitate the U.S. model that develop science and technology within the country based on the strong domestic research capacity? This study examines these questions using a comprehensive research model and a new Chinese patent dataset. The patent statistics in this study are created based on more than 120 thousand granted invention patent abstracts in China between 1985 and 2003. Compared with the Chinese patent data used in prior studies, this dataset distinguishes firm patents from patents awarded to universities and research institutes. The dependent variable for regression analysis is the technological innovation performance of Chinese domestic firms as measured by the number of patents awarded to firms in 30 Chinese provinces from 1989 to 1999. The final panel data for regression analysis were completed with other provincial indicators for the same years on research and development (R and D) expenditures by firms and public institutions, foreign direct investment (FDI), domestic consumption, and foreign exports. The results of count data fixed effect regression approaches show that the efforts of firms, measured by industrial R and D expenditures, spillovers from R and D activities conducted at universities and public institutions in the same region, and demand driven mainly by foreign exports are the most prominent positive factors in the domestic firms technological innovation performance. While the net impact of FDI on domestic firms patenting activity is mostly insignificant and sometimes negative