 Mandarins make markets: Leadership rotations and inter-provincial trade in ChinaJunyan Jiang and Yuan Mei Journal of Development Economics, 2020, vol. 147, issue C Abstract: The careers of many public officials span multiple localities, yet the economic effects of their inter-regional movements are not well understood. This paper focuses on the rotation of provincial leaders in China and studies its impact on regional economic integration. Estimation results using the gravity framework indicate that when a provincial leader is appointed as the party secretary of a new province, the trade volume from the new province to the old province increases, but not vice versa. Additional analyses using two novel datasets that capture the intensity of inter-provincial socioeconomic activities in China corroborate this finding. We then construct a quantitative trade model that incorporates input-output linkages and show that removing such inter-provincial links associated with the rotation of provincial leaders leads to an average welfare loss of 0.03%. Keywords: Regional integration; Domestic trade; Leadership rotation in China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:147:y:2020:i:c:s0304387820300997 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102524 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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