Volume 11, Issue 2

China’s economy has seen rapid development ever since its reform and opening-up strategy was launched in 1978. Strong economic expansion over the past four decades has taken China from low-income to upper-middle-income status. Looking back at the transformation that China has made, however, we must recognise that the old growth story is coming to an end. The phase of development driven by investment in physical capital will be increasingly supplanted by investment in assets such as knowledge and social capital as well as investment in preservation of natural capital. Recognising the challenges that China is facing, with this paper we aim to offer an approach to growth and development that could spell out a new development strategy for the country as the 21st century progresses. China will focus on the technologies with high-quality growth prospects: modern service sectors, including health, education, transport, communications and IT, artificial intelligence, finance, logistics, sustainable urban infrastructure and new food and land-use systems. With today’s technologies, China can help the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries embark on a much more sustainable, more efficient and greener form of development, avoiding historical problems of pollution and congestion, with China itself moving up the value chain at the same time.

It is of great importance to fully understand the connotation of and identify a quantitative method to measure common prosperity in China. This paper starts with a theoretical framework of fairness, efficiency, development, and shared prosperity, draws upon the proper understanding of common prosperity with Chinese characteristics, and explores a globally quantitative measurement of common prosperity, with a focus on the outcomes of national prosperity and prosperity for all. Furthermore, this paper discusses the assumptions and mathematical expressions of the quantitative function and analyzes the structural implications of indicator dimensions, functional relations, and variable standardization to ultimately provide a solid quantitative foundation for promoting common prosperity. The findings show that the quantitative measurement of common prosperity proposed in this paper performs stably in terms of weights, thresholds, and indicator settings. Based on the data of 162 economies collected between 1990 and 2020, this paper finds that China has made great progress in promoting common prosperity, which showcases the strengths of the country’s socialist system.

Government-led poverty alleviation faces multiple constraints and limitations fighting poverty, and it is urgent to mobilize social forces as many as possible, especially the involvement of corporate forces. To figure out whether corporate participation is effective to poverty alleviation and whether regional differences have an impact on it, this paper probes into results of corporate involvement in poverty alleviation, based on corporate social responsibility report information released by A-share listed companies in 2010–2017. The findings are as follows. (1) Companies in the western region, companies directly contacting consumers and large companies with good business performance are more willing to involve in poverty alleviation. (2) The participation of enterprises in poverty alleviation can increase the per capita income of rural residents, which is even better in underdeveloped areas. This revealed that social forces represented by companies have responded to China’s call of targeted poverty alleviation and fulfilled corporate social responsibilities, which will indeed help consolidate the achievements of poverty alleviation and lift underdeveloped areas out of poverty. From the perspective of corporate involvement in poverty alleviation, this paper extends related research on social forces and another participant in poverty alleviation, and enrich the literature on social benefits brought by companies performing social responsibilities.

Reasonable allocation of educational powers and expenditure responsibilities between central and local government is crucial to the development of education. The reason lies in the fact that local governments have relatively insufficient incentives to invest in education by using local fiscal revenues, while the central government, which pursues the maximization of the interests of the whole society, could promote education and other public services with spatial spilloves. The fiscal transfer payment has made up for the shortage of local investment in education. This paper uses 2010 census (micro data) and macro fiscal data to verify the effects above. Based on the year of birth and place, this paper constructs the proportion of fiscal transfers for compulsory education in the total fiscal revenue (local fiscal revenue and fiscal transfers) to reflect its structural effect. It is found that every 10% increase in the proportion of fiscal transfers brings at least additional 0.2 year of schoolings for local residents, and the effect of special transfer payments accounts for a larger share, among the three types of transfer payment. In the mechanism test, we find that transfer payment can effectively increase local education expenditure and produce an obvious structural effect. Based on this, in order to further improve the long-term educational performance of individuals, we believe that it is necessary to improve the incentive effect of the transfer payment system on common power and the division of expenditure responsibilities in the field of education.

The comprehensive transportation system is the intensive development stage of the transportation industry, which has gradually become the mainstream transportation mode in the world by giving full play to the advantages of different modes of transportation, promoting the effective use of resources, saving energy and reducing environmental pollution. Since the beginning of reform and opening up, China has achieved a steady improvement in the quality of transportation and a rapid growth in quantity, and has made remarkable achievements in stimulating economic growth and improving people’s well-being. During the14th Five-Year Plan period, China’s comprehensive transportation development will continue to take into account the basic needs and diversified needs, promote the diversified and high-quality development of transportation services, gradually realize the enjoyment of people’s travels and the smooth flow of goods, and continuously meet the growing needs of the people for a better life. We must follow the general idea of “forcing market entities to take the initiative to compete, guiding the development of emerging industries, cultivating the core carrier that drives the integrated development of transportation services, improving regional transportation coordination capabilities, and comprehensively using cutting-edge technologies”, constantly innovating and making breakthroughs in infrastructure, technological innovation, institutional mechanisms, investment and financing policies, and promoting the innovative development and overall leap of China’s comprehensive transportation.

With the rapid development of information technology, the logistics mode has undergone revolutionary changes. The circulation elements dominated by logistics enterprises are reconstructed to reduce circulation links, improve supply capacity and significantly improve efficiency. However, due to the overall small scale of logistics enterprises, there are some problems in the innovation of logistics mode, such as low performance of supply chain, quality of product supply hardly meeting the demand of quality consumption, shortage of new talents and so on. On the basis of systematically expounding the connotations and manifestations of the logistics mode innovation, this paper analyzes the impact of logistics mode innovation on quality consumption and the problems faced, and finally puts forward countermeasures and suggestions in order to provide reference for promoting the logistics mode innovation.

Accelerating the establishment of a new development paradigm in which domestic and overseas markets reinforce each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay, has posed new requirements for deepening the consumption tax reform. Therefore, we need to focus on accelerating the establishment of a new development paradigm, combined with the establishment of a modern fiscal and tax system and tax attributes, and make effective institutional arrangements for comprehensively promoting consumption, expanding domestic demand and then forming a strong domestic market. It is meaningful to reduce tax on consumer goods involved in upgrading consumption to meet people’s needs for a better life and to raise tax on high energy-consuming, highly polluting and unhealthy consumer goods to enhance the regulatory role of consumption tax and to promote the overall optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure. The revenue of consumption tax on key tax items (categories) should belong to the central government to facilitate the smooth flow of the economic circulation.