China

Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, and Development Strategies

Yanqing Jiang

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843347620
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634432
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

Trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) play a crucial role in shaping China's development strategies. The development of China's economy creates strong pressures for continuous restructuring. China therefore explores how trade and FDI affect China's development strategies regarding the process and pattern of restructuring. The book aims to provide the reader with findings that shed new light on the related issues and problems. The first chapter introduces the topics, and subsequent chapters enter into theoretical discussion and empirical analysis of trade, FDI, and development strategies, followed by a concluding final chapter. - Based on a rigorous theoretical framework - Applies various statistical and econometric methods - Uses rich and comprehensive data

1

Introduction

Abstract

Openness to foreign trade and foreign direct investment plays an important role in shaping China’s development strategies. This book explores how openness to foreign trade and foreign direct investment affects development strategies regarding China’s processes and patterns of economic restructuring. This introductory chapter introduces the topics, and subsequent chapters enter into theoretical discussions and empirical analyses addressing the many facets of the central theme of the book.

Key words

trade

foreign direct investment

development strategies

China

opening up

regional disparity

Openness to foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) plays an important role in shaping China’s development strategies. It is the development process in China that drives the strong pressure for continuous restructuring of the Chinese economy. This book, China: Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, and Development Strategies, explores how openness to foreign trade and FDI affects China’s development strategies as they relate to the processes and patterns of economic restructuring. The book aims to provide the reader with insight and findings that shed new light on related issues and problems. This introductory chapter introduces the topics, and subsequent chapters enter into the theoretical discussions and empirical analyses that address the many facets of the central theme of the book. Despite cross-referencing between chapters from time to time, each chapter is sufficiently self-contained and can thus be read on its own, a feature that hopefully improves the usefulness of the book as a text.

Along with China’s rapid economic growth in the past few decades, substantial disparities have emerged in productivity and per capita income across different regions in China. In Chapter 2, in preparation for subsequent examinations of regional development and spatial inequality in China, we construct a theoretical framework within which regional growth in total output can be broken down into the growth of its various contributors. As unbalanced growth and development in China can be seen to be a result of the uneven regional growth of productivity and production factors, we then propose a coherent framework, not only to investigate the potential forces shaping the pattern of China’s spatial disparities, but also to evaluate their relative importance by quantitatively breaking the imbalance down into its various contributory factors. In sum, the discussions in this chapter constitute an analytic foundation on which our analyses in subsequent chapters can be built.

Different phases in development strategies have generated different forces that affect China’s unbalanced development. In Chapter 3, we present facts and trends about the interregional inequality in China, and attempt to establish a linkage between the various forces generated by policy regime switching and the changing pattern of interregionally unbalanced economic development in China. Among other findings, our empirical results suggest that the sharp increase in overall interregional inequality in the early 1990s can largely be attributed to the between-zone contribution of physical capital. Besides the coastal–inland disparity, the variation between coastal regions appears at times to be the dominant factor behind overall interregional inequality in China. Moreover, it can be shown that the process underlying the opening up of China to trade and FDI does account for a substantial share of China’s interregional inequality, and the share rises over time.

Chapter 4 is devoted to preliminary discussion of the potential effects of foreign trade on economic development as it relates to the Chinese economy, with a focus on the possible mechanisms through which foreign trade can exert its various impacts on economic development. One such mechanism is technology diffusion. Openness to foreign trade promotes total factor productivity (TFP) growth in China by facilitating technological spillovers from technologically advanced countries. Our preliminary empirical analysis in this chapter is based on a hypothesis positing that, given the level of TFP at the world technology frontier, China’s regional TFP growth is a positive function of regional openness to foreign trade and a negative function of the current level of regional TFP. Our regression results show that there exists a significantly positive effect of regional openness on regional TFP growth, and that there is evidence for conditional convergence in TFP across China’s regions.

Symmetrical to the preceding chapter, Chapter 5 is devoted to preliminary discussion of the potential effects of openness to FDI on China’s economic development. Our focus in this chapter is on potential mechanisms through which openness to FDI can exert its various impacts on China’s economic development. FDI inflows not only enhance capital accumulation in China, which in itself is crucial to China’s development, but also exert several spillover effects through different channels. The regression results of our preliminary empirical analysis in Chapter 5 suggest that regional openness to FDI tends to promote regional TFP growth and hence regional income growth. Motivated by the preliminary discussions in Chapters 4 and 5, we then proceed to investigate the impacts of openness to foreign trade and FDI on China’s economic development from different perspectives in the subsequent chapters of this book.

In Chapter 6 we investigate the effects of international openness, domestic coastal–inland market integration, and human capital accumulation on TFP growth in inland regions in China. By using a variety of panel data regression techniques, we show that human capital accumulation plays an important role in promoting TFP growth in China’s inland provinces. Our results support the argument that the most important contribution of human capital to income growth lies not in its static direct effect as an accumulable factor in the production function, but rather in its dynamic role in promoting TFP growth. Our results also provide evidence of the positive role coastal–inland market integration plays in promoting TFP growth in inland regions of China.

Openness to foreign trade and FDI increases the efficiency in the way production factors are allocated by lifting barriers to the mobility of resources across different sectors. In Chapter 7 we empirically analyze the relationship between openness to foreign trade and FDI and China’s structural change. Our regression results show just how useful the Lewis model can be at analyzing China’s process of industrialization. Our empirical analyses also show that openness to foreign trade and FDI plays an important role in China’s structural transformation. The results suggest that regional openness promotes regional structural transformation in terms of labor share shifts from the agricultural to the manufacturing sector, and that structural transformation in poorer regions tends to be faster, demonstrating convergence in per-worker income across the different regions of China.

Chapter 8 focuses on the linkage between change in the pattern of China’s comparative advantage and the continuous transformation in economic structure of the country. After formalizing the processes of structural transformation and the shift of comparative advantage across sectors, we use the specialization index to proxy for the intensity of comparative advantage in our empirical analysis. Results show that the specialization index of primary goods has been declining while that of manufactured goods has been climbing over time. They further show that, of the various subdivisions of primary goods, the specialization index of mineral fuels and non-edible raw materials has been falling whereas, of the various subdivisions of manufactured goods, the specialization index of machinery and transport equipment has been rising. To a large degree, the empirical results support the hypothesis of the theoretical model presented in Chapter 8.

Chapter 9 contains a theoretical study concerning transaction efficiency and the patterns of specialization, which has important implications for empirical analysis and policy evaluation with respect to a large developing country such as China. In this theoretical study, we revisit the old Ricardian model of comparative advantage. Following an inframarginal methodology, we build an extended theoretical model based on the concepts of comparative advantage and transaction efficiency to explain development and inequality in developing economies. According to our model, an increase in domestic transaction efficiency reduces inequality within a developing economy while an increase in international transaction efficiency enhances the overall welfare level in a developing economy. The results of our model have important implications for China in its policy-making.

In Chapter 10 we explore issues related to economies of scale and industrial agglomeration, and their linkages to regional development and interregional disparity in China. We focus specifically on an empirical examination of the spatial distribution of manufacturing activity in China in the 2000s, a time of increasing opening up to foreign trade and FDI. We set up our regression model and carry out a regression exercise to empirically examine the effects of openness to foreign trade and FDI on industrial distribution and agglomeration across China’s provinces. Our regression results support our claim that openness to foreign trade and FDI indeed plays an important role in shaping the spatial pattern and distribution of industries across China’s provinces.

Knowledge as an intangible production input not only promotes economic growth but also facilitates structural change of a developing economy. Education is the major means of knowledge accumulation. Higher education in China plays an important role not only in promoting knowledge accumulation, but also in facilitating human capital mobility in China. Chapter 11 empirically investigates the issue of the relationship between regional disparities, college preferences, and admissions under the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) system and potential interregional human capital mobility in China. Our empirical results show that examinees from western provinces tend to have a strong preference for coastal universities, compared with examinees from central provinces. In this sense, we expect college admissions in China under the NCEE system to exert a stronger impact on potential human capital movement from western to coastal regions than from central to coastal regions.

Chapter 12 aims to empirically examine the linkages between pollution emission, output growth, and openness to foreign trade and FDI. Our regression results suggest that the ‘gains from openness’ hypothesis, which posits that openness to foreign trade and FDI has a positive impact on the environment, dominates the ‘race to the bottom’ hypothesis as far as China’s regions are concerned. Our regressions do not provide evidence to support the ‘race to the bottom’ hypothesis. As openness to foreign trade and FDI is likely to contribute to a better environment for China, policy-makers should remove barriers to foreign trade and FDI for environmental technology, goods, and services to allow further gains from openness.

Finally, Chapter 13 provides a tentative discussion of the knowledge economy and knowledge-based development in China. Despite its long tradition of respect for knowledge, China’s development is still based much more heavily on the advantages of low-cost labor. For China, one central challenge posed by the global knowledge economy is to develop an industrial structure that could better exploit rapidly growing global knowledge to accelerate its own economic development and facilitate its transition toward a knowledge-based economy. For this purpose, China should further leverage its FDI inflows, focusing more on attracting FDI with a higher degree of knowledge content. Foreign trade is another channel through which Chinese enterprises can tap global knowledge and technology. While importing capital goods is a major way of acquiring foreign technology, the management and knowledge support that comes with it are necessary to maximize productivity from technology investment.

2

Regional growth and its decomposition

Abstract

Along with China’s rapid economic growth in the past few decades, substantial disparities have emerged in productivity and per-capita income across the different regions of China. In this chapter, in preparation for subsequent examinations of regional development and spatial inequality in China, we construct a theoretical framework within which regional growth in total output can be broken down into the growth of its various contributors. As unbalanced growth and develop...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• List of abbreviations
• About the author
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Regional growth and its decomposition
• 3: Unbalanced development in China
• 4: Potential effects of foreign trade on development
• 5: Potential effects of foreign direct investment on development
• 6: Interregional disparity and the development of inland regions
• 7: Economic change and restructuring, dual economy, and development strategies
• 8: Static and dynamic comparative advantages
• 9: Transaction efficiency and patterns of specialization
• 10: Economies of scale and industrial agglomeration
• 11: Higher education and human capital mobility
• 12: Environmental factors and sustainable development
• 13: Knowledge economy and knowledge-based development: a tentative discussion
• Index