EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Geography, Economic Policy, and Regional Development in China

Sylvie Démurger, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Wing Woo, Shuming Bao, Gene Chang and Andrew Mellinger

No 8897, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996-99. Their respective contributions in percentage points were 2.5 and 3.5 for the province-level metropolises, 0.6 and 2.3 for the northeastern provinces, 2.8 and 2.8 for the coastal provinces, 2.0 and 1.6 for the central provinces, 0 and 1.6 for the northwestern provinces, and 0.1 and 1.8 for the southwestern provinces. Because the so-called preferential policies are largely deregulation policies that have allowed coastal Chinese provinces to integrate into the international economy, it is far superior to reduce regional disparity by extending these deregulation policies to the interior provinces than by re-regulating the coastal provinces. Two additional inhibitions to income convergence are the household registration system, which makes the movement of the rural poor to prosperous areas illegal, and the monopoly state bank system that, because of its bureaucratic nature, disburses most of its funds to its large traditional customers, few of whom are located in the western provinces. Improving infrastructure to overcome geographic barriers is fundamental to increasing western growth, but increasing human capital formation (education and medical care) is also crucial because only it can come up with new better ideas to solve centuries-old problems like unbalanced growth.

JEL-codes: D30 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ifn and nep-sea
Note: EFG IFM
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (144)

Published as Sylvie Démurger & Jeffrey D. Sachs & Wing Thye Woo & Shuming Bao & Gene Chang & Andrew Mellinger, 2002. "Geography, Economic Policy, and Regional Development in China," Asian Economic Papers, MIT Press, vol. 1(1), pages 146-197.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8897.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Geography, Economic Policy, and Regional Development in China (2002) Downloads
Working Paper: Geography, Economic Policy and Regional Development in China (2002) Downloads
Working Paper: Geography, Economic Policy and Regional Development in China (2001) Downloads
Working Paper: Geography, Economic Policy and Regional Development in China (2001) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8897

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8897

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8897