Suchergebnisse

China's economic reform over the past 30 years has allowed the free market to drive economic development. However, government still plays a key role in the energy sector by allocating energy conservation and emissions abatement. How does the government make an equity decision as a tradeoff to market efficiency? This is an unanswered question. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the government's preference toward equity and efficiency. Using the provincial level CO2 intensity allocation data, we investigate the political decision that the government made based on the equity and efficiency criteria. We find that the equity index plays a more important role than the efficiency index in determining the CO2 intensity target. In addition, political factors such as social stability are found to be important factors.

Our analysis is the first of its kind to explore patterns of subsidization and CO2 emissions in China's electricity producing sector. Applying data for all power plants across China and controlling for the age, capacity and location of generating stations, we find that plants attracting a higher government subsidy are also worryingly the plants generating a disproportionate share of CO2 emissions. This distortion is incongruent with China's aspiration for a greener economy but may be eliminated if China delivers on its November 2013 announcement to review many industry subsidies on its way to a fully-fledged market economy (Bloomberg News, 28.02.2014).

AbstractThis paper traces the institutional root of China's rural industrialization to a historical policy, which paired factories in urban areas with people's communes in the countryside during the Send‐Down Movement in the 1970s. The policy, initially intended to improve the lives of sent‐down youth (SDY), is believed to have provided some initial impetus for industrial development in rural areas before the marketization reform that began in the late 1970s. Based on a manually collected county‐level panel dataset of Zhejiang Province, we find that following the implementation of the pairing policy in 1974, counties that received a higher concentration of SDY, relative to their rural population, achieved faster growth in per capita industrial output of commune enterprises. Our results are consistent with various historical accounts. In addition, our tentative evidence shows that the pairing policy had a prolonged effect on rural economic development, lasting into the 1980s. Overall, our findings reveal the importance of some pre‐reform institutions in shaping China's unique paths towards industrialization.