Volume 13, Issue 4

The role of the dual structure in economic growth is often weakened by the use of neoclassical growth models, resulting in the defect of strong theoretical but weak empirical evidence. We take the labor employment rate as an abstract attribute of the dual stage and construct a growth accounting equation that can conduct unified growth accounting among economies at different stages of development and among different stages of development of the same economy. On this basis, we measured the potential contribution of increasing the labor employment rate to economic growth in the future. The results show that the elimination of the dual structure will continue to be an important source of China’s medium and long term economic growth.

Balancing macroeconomic growth with regional equilibrium development is essential for China’s pursuit of the modernization through regional coordinated development. Taking a macroeconomic output perspective and employing a counterfactual framework, this paper evaluates the economic growth effects of China’s “place-based” and “people-based” regional policies, and explores the future implementation effects and optimal combinations of these policies under different market environments. Given that “people-based” policy cannot address market failures in spatial dimensions, the essence of the academic debate over regional policy paths lies in different understandings of the relationship between government and markets.

Under the wave of the fourth industrial revolution, the development of new quality productive forces represented by intelligent technology will shape the form, structure and nature of new production relations, such as the reduction of the coordination status of human-human relations and the increasing importance of the coordination of human-machine relations. There will be a fundamental revolution in ownership relations, the form of enterprise organization, the way in which they are distributed and the structure of management. The assumptions, logic, and paradigms of economics that are compatible with the first three industrial revolutions will encounter great challenges. To this end, it is necessary to comprehensively deepen the reform of the actual economic system and promptly adjust the capital system, industrial policy, employment and distribution policy, market policy, education policy, science and technology policy, and talent policy that are not suitable for the development of new quality productive forces.

Economic studies on the new quality productive forces NQPF are mushrooming, however, on the whole, the majority of existing studies primarily focus on revealing and summarizing the economic laws guiding the development of NQPF based on the“general”characteristics of individual organizations at the microlevel and institutions at the macro level. This paper argues that the background of “getting great” and the competition scenario between countries determine that “heterogeneity” is the most relevant and theoretically challenging issue in the NQPF, and also the most likely to yield significant academic outcomes. In view of the fact that the existing problem setting, conceptual framework, and analytical tools of existing eccomics fail to effectively address the unique prescriptive phenomena of NQPF, including direct competition between countries, power countries, and heterogeneity, future academic research on new quality productive forces should go beyond the current “general” issues orientation, directly address the extreme phenomena and problems in the “genesis” stage in the latest round of scientific and technological revolution, and strive to push forward the frontiers of theoretical research.

With the rising labor costs and increasing resource and environmental constraints in China, coupled with geopolitical conflicts, related industries or production processes are shifting to emerging economies such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Mexico. Among these, India’s development potential has garnered significant attention, and the “China-to-India Industrial Transfer Model” in the global industrial chain poses a greater impact and threat to China. This paper constructs a quantitative model to measure the impact of industrial transfer on the home country. It designs three scenarios—ultra-long-term, medium-to-long-term, and short-to-medium-term—and uses counterfactual analysis to assess the impact of India’s absorption of China’s industrial transfer on China’s GDP and employment under different scenarios. The research results indicate that the transfer of industries from China to India will generate significant socio-economic shocks. In the ultra-long-term, this industrial transfer could lead to a 15.6% reduction in China’s GDP, a 16.8% decrease in the overall income of the workforce, and a reduction in the number of employed people by 110 million. The impacts are also substantial in the medium- to-long-term and short-to-medium-term scenarios. By sectors, the relocation of low and medium-low R&D intensity manufacturing sectors has a significant impact on the Chinese economy in both the short-to-medium and medium-to-long term perspectives. The relocation of high R&D intensity manufacturing sectors, represented by the computer industry, also causes considerable negative effects on the Chinese economy in the ultra-long-term perspective. This quantitative analysis helps anticipate the economic impact of future changes in industrial layout on China’s economy and facilitates the development of preemptive strategies. Based on the medium-to-long-term international economic outlook and the characteristics of domestic regional and industrial economic development, we propose three policy implications.

Improving the quality of foreign investment to help functional upgrading of the value chain is an important starting point for China’s manufacturing industry to achieve low-carbon and high-quality development. Based on the data of the functional activities of each manufacturing greenfield investment project in China from 2003 to 2018, this paper constructs specialization index of the upstream and downstream functional division of labor of value chains, and theoretically explains and empirically tests the impact and mechanism of the functional upgrading of the value chain driven by the improvement of foreign investment quality on the embodied emissions in China’s export trade. The results show that the functional upgrading of the value chain can significantly reduce the embodied emissions in China’s export trade. The mechanism analysis shows that the functional upgrading of the value chain driven by the improvement of the quality of foreign investment mainly plays a role in reducing the embodied emissions in China’s export trade through the optimization effect of factor structure, the effect of human capital accumulation and the effect of service demand creation. Extended analysis finds that high-quality foreign investment engaged in upstream functional activities and inflows into eastern China have more obvious inhibitory effects on the embodied emissions in export trade. At the same time, the functional upgrading of the value chain is more conducive to reducing the embodied emissions in export trade in pollution-intensive manufacturing industries. This paper verifies the “pollution halo” effect of high-quality foreign investment, and provides strong support for China to attract and utilize foreign investment more vigorously and promote high-level opening up under the new situation.