The Singapore Economic Review

The purpose of this study is to understand the speed and quality of China’s economic growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study defines high-quality economic growth as a growth rate with a low variance and adopts quarterly time-series data for China’s real GDP growth rate to analyze its regime switches and structural changes by estimating a conditional Markov chain model. The study further utilizes the estimated parameters to predict the smoothed probabilities of each of four joint states for China’s real GDP growth rate from 2021 Q4 to 2025 Q3. The primary finding of this study is that, during the period from 2020 Q1 to 2021 Q3, the outbreak of COVID-19 shocked China’s economy and its economic growth rate fluctuated dramatically, which resulted in its variance being relatively high. However, China’s economic growth rate is very likely to gradually stabilize (as evidenced by a low variance) and to grow at a medium-to-high speed with high quality during the forecast period.

The aim of this paper is to simulate the effect of land revenue policy reform in China under the shock of tax policy reform. To this end, this research has built a computable general equilibrium model and collected data from China’s input–output table for 2017 to construct the China land revenue social accounting matrix for 2017. Five scenarios of land reform policy have been considered. The first scenario concerns a reduction in the construction land supply; the simulation shows that the reform will lead to increasing real estate prices, which will result in a crowding-out effect for the manufacturing industry. The second scenario involves levying a property tax nationwide, which will restrain the trend of the increase in the real estate price and increase the local governments’ revenue, although household income and economic growth will be restrained. The third scenario has to do with a reduction in the deed tax. The simulation shows that this reform can alleviate the negative impact on the economy. The fourth scenario is related to a combination of the first and second scenarios, which will lead to a decrease in employment demand and an increase in land financial revenue. Finally, the fifth scenario is also a combined policy involving the first, second and third scenarios, which will result in higher urban and rural household income than the fourth scenario.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of consumer expenditure patterns, rather than categories, on subjective well-being (SWB) in China. This study adopts microsurvey data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and performs cluster analysis to form household consumer expenditure patterns for five burdens. The primary finding is that consumer expenditure patterns as well as consumer characteristics can significantly affect Chinese people’s SWB. However, the results from using consumer expenditure categories as explanatory variables are not reliable due to inconsistent results from using the amount and ratio of consumption expenditure. The conclusions regarding the influences of consumer expenditure patterns on Chinese people’s SWB are, nevertheless, robust.

This study cuts through the pension replacement rate and aims to investigate the impact of delayed retirement on social welfare. First, this study establishes a two-period overlapping generations model and obtains the effect of delayed retirement on the replacement rate under general equilibrium conditions. Second, this paper uses actuarial and statistical methods to build a pension balance model and specifically analyzes the effect of delayed retirement on the pension replacement rate on different income groups under local equilibrium conditions. The study finds that when the contribution base and other parameters do not change, the retirement age and the replacement rate move in the same direction. When the increase in the retirement age becomes larger, the proportion of the replacement rate also increases gradually becoming larger. The increase in the range of the pension replacement rate of the high-income group is greater than for the low- and middle-income groups.

Based on three waves of the nationally representative survey conducted in 2005, 2008–2009, and 2011–2012, this study investigates the effect of living arrangements on intergenerational transfers in China. Outcomes of interest include monetary transfers, contact, informal care, and emotional support that adult children provide to older parents. Both actual living arrangements and the discrepancy between actual and preferred living arrangements are considered. Endogeneity bias is accounted for through fixed-effects instrumental-variable regression modeling. It is found that co-residence serves as a substitute for monetary transfers and is positively associated with the probability that parents would receive contact, informal care and emotional support from adult children. Living alone with children in the same city is positively associated with the receipt of monetary transfers and contact by older parents but is not statistically related to the other two outcomes. There is an expressed desire for independent living among older people, which impacts transfer behaviors in a complex manner. This study provides a better understanding of the role of the family amidst ongoing social security reforms in China.

Based on province-level data on China’s local institutional environment from 2008 to 2014, we explore the relationship between the local institutional environment and stock price crash risk. We find that a stronger local institutional environment curbs stock price crash risk. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between local institutional environment and stock price crash risk for state-owned versus privately owned enterprises. We find that a stronger local institutional environment is more likely to curb stock price crash risk in state-owned enterprises than in privately owned enterprises. Our results are robust to additional tests. These findings suggest that it is necessary to accelerate the progress of local marketization in China to ensure the development of the stock market and a strong economy.

This study aims to investigate the role of accounting comparability in firm investment efficiency of firms in China. Using a sample of listed firms in China’s A-share market from 2005 to 2016, this study empirically categorizes the firms into two groups based on overinvestment and underinvestment. After implementing several tests including those for collinearity and heteroskedasticity, the primary results of the empirical models show that accounting comparability can only improve the efficiency of a company’s investment in terms of reducing the overinvestment and increasing the underinvestment through the impact of a financing constraint on the overinvestment and underinvestment. This study thus suggests that the Chinese authorities should take steps to ensure that firms increase the extent of their accounting comparability with other firms, thereby making their accounting statements more comparable not only in the same industry, but also in different industries in accordance with the official accounting regulations and by adopting the same definitions for accounting indicators.

Six financial markets were verified contagious to Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite (SSEC): domestic equity market (SSEC and China COSCO Shipping Co.), domestic currency market, international currency market, global shipping market, commodity future market and bulk shipping market (BDI) which regarded as a leading indicator of future economic growth instead of Li Keqiang index. This research analyzed intermarket contagion from March 14, 2008 to March 31, 2018. MIDAS-GARCH model was adopted to identify the spillover effect among the Shanghai Stock market and inter-market indices. The findings of this study were concluded as follows: (1) The commodity, global shipping market had significant volatility transmission to SSEC both before and after the crash crisis. (2) The volatility of domestic currency market was significantly contagious to SSEC only after the crash.

This study aims at investigating the intensity of environmental regulation on firm’s share of domestic value-added in gross exports in China. An unbalanced firm-level panel data from 2000 to 2014 is adopted to estimate 10 two-way fixed effects models suggested by Hausman test for the entire sample of 648,801 and subsamples of three trade patterns, three types of ownership and three regions. The primary finding of this study is that for the entire sample and subsamples of general trade, mixed trade, non-state-owned and foreign-owned enterprises and enterprises in the eastern region, the intensity of environmental regulation has a “U-shaped” influence on firm’s share of domestic value-added in gross exports in China, meaning that this influence is negative first and then turns to positive after the intensity of environmental regulation reaches a certain level. This conclusion is reasonable and consistent with our expectation.