Recent academic studies on China’s model of socioeconomic development indicate that China has gained significant competitive advantages in industrial production since it joined the WTO. Many well-established cases demonstrate that China’s strategies during its rapid industrialization process are consistent with an alternative framework of institutional analysis we have been developing. Among the different views, it appears that a certain degree of consensus is emerging regarding China’s model of economic growth and social development. The cases examined by scholars stationed both in and outside China seem to have provided increasingly convincing evidence that China is best equipped for a leadership role in creating business and job opportunities for the young generation of the world in the digital age and the era of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” along with the US and a unified Europe.
Taking advantages of the ever-expanding global value chains, China is realizing its enormous potential as the new center for business and institutional innovation. It is predictable that the impact of its ongoing industrialization process on the world economic system will be profound. 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Started as a poor agricultural economy, China has now become the workshop of the world after decades of endeavor in its modernization drive. To address some of the issues associated with China’s industrialization process and its global impact, the theme of this symposium, “China’s Industrialization and the Expansion of Global Value Chains” was taken from the annual conference of the Chinese Economic Association (CEA) (Europe/UK) in September 2019, Stockholm. Some papers included were presented at parallel sessions of the CEA annual conference.
The first article of the symposium by Shenxiang Xie, Mingxin Zhang, Shenglong Liu uses firm-level data from China to examine the responses of export firms’ R&D activities to AD barriers. Their results show that AD barriers significantly reduce firms’ R&D investment and R&D intensity. An interesting finding from the study is that AD barriers have a significant effect on firms’ innovation, long-term productivity improvement, and allocation of R&D resources.
The second article by Yuning Gao, Meng Li, and Yufeng Lu discusses construction and aggregation methods of the transaction matrix between enterprises and develops Multiregional Input-output table. A large data set of value-added tax was employed to trace the shift of profit and tax avoidance.
The third article by Yanqing Jiang, Yunliang Jiang, and Jinghai Zheng examines the possible effects of regional infrastructure investment on regional per capita income growth and regional productivity growth. They found a negative effect on regional per capita income growth. The result suggests that this type of investment did not benefit regional economic growth through productivity gains.
The fourth article by Zhidan Shi and Xiao Tang investigates the changes in China’s sectorial imbalance and provincial disparity based on the Human Development Index. They observed that the provincial disparity among different areas continually declines, while the area of the largest disparity varies. Economic growth was found to be the largest contributor to the continuous decrease in HDI inequality, while education and health are positively correlated with HDI.
Acknowledgments
Jinghai Zheng’s involvement in this work has benefited from financial support for the project of applied productivity analysis and policy research at Tsinghua University [C2018053] and [20155010298].