انحراف فاکتور بازار در طول زمان، فضا و بخش ها در چین

In this paper, we measure TFP losses in Chinaʼs non-agricultural economy associated with labour and capital misallocation across provinces and sectors between 1985 and 2007. We also decompose the overall loss into factor market distortions within provinces (between state and non-state sectors) and distortions between provinces (within sectors). Over the entire period, misallocation lowers aggregate non-agricultural TFP by an average of twenty percent. However, after initially declining, these losses increased appreciably beginning in the mid-1990s. This reversal can be attributed almost exclusively to increasing misallocation of capital between state and non-state sectors within provinces, while losses from between province misallocation remained fairly constant. We argue that the recent increase in capital market distortions is related to government policies that encourage investments in the state sector at the expense of investments in the more productive non-state sector.

Some of the rapid growth that China has enjoyed the last three and a half decades has likely come from reductions in distortions as a result of economic reform. An important feature of China’s pre-reform economy was a high degree of local autarky. At the provincial level, self-sufficiency in both agriculture and industry were aggressively pursued, and reinforced through limited investment in transportation infrastructure (Donnithorne, 1972). These policies were coupled with tight restrictions on labour mobility both within and between provinces through the household registration or hukou system and strict control over the allocation of capital through the use of administrative credit plans. With the onset of economic reform in the late 1970s, some of the restraints on resource mobility persisted. In addition to restrictions on the mobility of labour out of the countryside (Chan et al., 2008), local protectionism and trade barriers arose to impede the inter-regional flow of goods (Young, 2000; Poncet, 2003). A credit plan continued to be used to ensure access to new loans by stateowned firms (Brandt and Zhu, 2000), the effects of which were reinforced by barriers to the flow of capital across regions (Boyreau-Debray and Wei, 2005; Dollar and Wei, 2007).

In this paper, we examine the impact of the misallocation of resources across provinces and sectors (state versus nonstate) on aggregate non-agricultural TFP. Despite significant increases in factor mobility, our analysis suggests that China continues to suffer high TFP losses arising from factor market distortions. After declining during the first decade and a half