Reviewing China and Africa: Old interests,new trends – or new interests,old trends?

Africa was for a long time considered to be Europe's backyard. This situation since the turn of the century has changed considerably. With new actors pursuing their own economic interests, mainly representing the growing influence of so-called emerging economies, new multipolar realities have arrived on the continent. Access to and control over natural resources has entered a new stage of competition among external actors and in their interaction with local elites. Africa has changed as an arena, and realities are increasingly shaped by Chinese influence too. This overview on recent contributions to the debate summarises the current assessments of the degree, impact and effects of the Chinese economic expansion. It then reflects on the potential new scope for cooperation and development and ends with some conclusions on the possible options and opportunities this might offer.     

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership: new paradigm or old wine in a new bottle?

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is currently negotiating with its six trading partners to form a new trade agreement called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The RCEP intends to harmonise rules and regulations across multiple overlapping free trade agreements in the region, and thereby attract new members. However, it faces several challenges. The mention of a flexibility principle and the ‘ASEAN Way’ of decision‐making has led many to believe that the RCEP will be yet another low‐quality regional trade agreement. However, the RCEP presents all ASEAN members with the opportunity to take a role in setting the agenda for a region‐wide agreement. Hence, despite its challenges, ASEAN must make the effort to reach an attractive RCEP vis‐à‐vis other competing regional agreements. Accordingly, this paper describes what the RCEP is intended to be, how it emerged, and the issues that might affect the agreement's final quality, in order to evaluate if it will establish a new paradigm or a repackaged version of ASEAN's existing trade agreements.     

The stability of German export demand equations – have German exports suffered from the strength of the euro?

Since its introduction in 1999, the euro has shown pronounced swings against the US dollar and the British pound. In this study, we investigate whether this evolution has affected bilateral German exports to two of its major export destinations: the US and the UK. Applying the autoregressive distributed lags bounds testing approach, we find different elasticities of trade between the two export destinations. Our results show that the export demand equation for the US seems to be more stable than that for the UK. Furthermore, it seems that the short-run dynamics in particular have changed.     

The impact of destination tariffs on China’s exports: Country,firm, and product perspectives

Based on multi-product heterogeneous firm trade theory, we combine China's customs data with the World Integrated Trade Solution’s (WITS) tariff data from 2002 to 2013 and analyze the impact of destination tariffs on China's exports at the country, firm, and product levels. The results reveal that tariffs had a negative effect on country-level exports and their extensive margins. After controlling for the inter-firm composition effect, tariffs had negative effects on firm-level exports and their intensive margins, but positive effects on their extensive margins. After also controlling for the within-firm export composition effect, tariffs had a negative impact on the exports of core products; however, the negative impact diminished as the core grade and technological content of the products increased. Using these elasticities to analyze Sino-U.S. trade frictions, we determine that the additional U.S. tariffs reduced China's exports of high-tech products more than its medium- and low-tech products.     

Europe,Germany and “The German Model”: Economic Links and Implications for China

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the economic links first between the European Union (EU) and China and then I focus on the economic relationships between Germany and China. The links I will consider include international trade and direct investment. Lastly I highlight some elements of the so-called “German Model” or the “Berlin Way” and examine if they can be of policy relevance to China. There are four main results: first, EU-China trade and investment relationships are strong, deepening rapidly but they are somewhat unbalanced and asymmetric. Second, the economic relationships between Europe and China are focused on manufacturing. Third, the EU-China relationships are primarily Deutschland-centric. Lastly, elements of the “German Model” such as Mitbestimmung, Mittelstand and the German apprenticeship system can have important structural and policy implications as China continues to grow and experiment with reforms aiming at combining stability, harmony and competitiveness.     

The Analysis and Improvement on the Lowest Price Method

The book of Modem Consulting Method and Practice is the appointed teaching material for registered consulting engineer qualification examination （investment） of China. Its Lowest Price method in evaluating mutually exclusive project has some problems, which contradict the delta IRR and NPV methods. We improve the method and recommend Good-Bad Boundary Price Method to solve problem of this type.     

The link between fiscal decentralization and poverty – Evidence from Indonesia

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between fiscal decentralization and poverty using Indonesian provincial-level data from 2001 to 2018 by way of panel data estimation. This paper circumvents the potential endogeneity problem between the interest variable to provide an unbiased estimated impact of the critical variables. The results provide robust evidence that the implementation of Indonesian fiscal decentralization contributes to poverty reduction outcomes. This paper also proposes a policy set based on the estimation result to the central government in handling the non-linear relationship between fiscal decentralization and poverty.     

The landlord lag – productivity on peasant farms and landlord demesnes during the agricultural revolution in Sweden 1700–1860

In a longstanding debate among economic historians about the role of the peasants and the manors in the agrarian transformation, a variety of qualitative and quantitative indicators have been used, but no one has until now been able to compare the actual production outcomes. In this paper, we investigate the land productivity development for manorial demesnes and peasant farmers, respectively, over the course of the agricultural revolution. The sources used are unique in an international perspective and consists of tithes on individual farm level for 34 parishes in Scania, covering over 2500 peasant farms, which are compared with production data for 20 manorial demesnes.

The study generates vital information on the process of agricultural transformation and its leading actors. We assess the implications of the productivity development for the total production, and the spectacular growth in this under the agricultural revolution, by calculating production and surplus among the different types of cultivators. Our results show that the landlords gained a small advantage in the middle of the 1700s, but in the century to come, they lagged behind in terms of land productivity. A large peasantry cultivating the majority of the land did not constitute an obstacle to growth, but rather the reverse.     

The Impact of Product Market Competition on Employers’ Training Investments. Evidence from German Establishment Panel Data

According to different training theories the sign of the relationship between competition and training is ambiguous. Using a large panel data set of German manufacturing establishments, this paper investigates the impact of product market competition on training incidence and on the share of trained workers. In our empirical analysis, we use three indicators of product market competition which are the Herfindahl index, the number of firms at the 3-digit industry level and the price-cost margin. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, there is no statistically significant effect of product market competition on training.     

Are “new” and “old” EU members becoming more financially integrated? A threshold cointegration analysis

We assess the degree of financial integration for a selected number of “new” EU member states with Germany. The analysis is performed using a threshold vector error-correction (TVECM) model with fixed rolling window. By employing this methodology we are able to evaluate the degree and dynamics of transaction costs resulting from various market imperfections. TVECM model is applied on interest rate data from different segments of financial markets covering the 1994–2006 period. The hypothesis we test is to what extent European integration tendencies resulted in a more efficient and integrated financial markets. Our findings support the gradual integration hypothesis.     

The Talent Resource Plan and Policymaking Research on the Major Cities in the West of China ——Taking Xi＇an City of China as an Example

It points out that talent resource development has an important influence on the development of west region. But the phenomenon that talents are idle and wasted is very outstanding in each province and cities of the west. The paper analyzes the meaning of the concept the coordinated development of talents and economy is of special significance for China, reviews the latest development of the theory and practice of regional talent plan and points out the principles, methods and countermeasures of coordinated development based on regional talent plan. Finally, it does positive research by taking Xi＇an as an example.     

The Anti-dumping Issue on Chinese Products and China＇s Countermeasures

With the development of China＇s economy, more and more commodities are exported to foreign countries. At the same time, Chinese enterprises are facing more and more anti-dumping issues from abroad. China＇s position on this issue is analyzed and the counten＇neasures are provided in this paper.     

The Positive Research on the Tendency of Industrial Agglomeration and Forecasting

New Economic Geography puts forward a famous law of inverted U curve. Meanwhile Chinese scholar Qi Liang proposes industry＇s life cycle theory, which is incompatible to the law of inverted U curve. In order to verify which theory is suitable for the situation of the industrial agglomeration of Chinese industry, we select ten kinds of representative products, carry on a positive analysis of the tendency of the industrial agglomeration from 1980 to 2003, observe where these industries center and forecast the industrial concentration of eight kinds of products in the following ten years.     

The Empirical Study on Interaction between Corporate Ownership and Board Structure

Corporate ownership, board structure and leadership structure are important internal governance mechanisms. They have effect on firm performance, and also are affected by many internal factors of the firm. In this paper, by means of theory and empirical analysis, we discuss the relation between ownership and board structure and the determinants of them, find some significant results such as management ownership which is affected by firm performance, as well as relates to outside director ownership. These findings tell us that there exist some substitutions and complement relations in govemance mechanisms, which is important to the research on manner that corporate governance works.