Economic growth, Chinese business innovation, and environment

China’s success in integrating itself into the world economy has attracted worldwide attentions. Developing nations are particularly impressed with the way that China mobilizes its resources for rapid economic growth. China’s cautious and gradual approach to economic reform may provide useful experience to countries in economic transition. The outstanding performance of China’s economy in responding to the global financial crisis has been catalytic to the economic recovery in the United States and the European Union. To evaluate the sustainability of the emerging Chinese model of economic development an important aspect is to understand to what extent productivity growth has contributed to China’s spectacular economic growth in the past three decades. The Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies (JCEBS) henceforth calls for contributions to the 2011 Special Issue on Chinese Productivity.

The complexity and enormous scale of China’s economy require methodologies that can be used for systemic investigations of productivity performance. The special issue encourages empirical studies within the neo-classical framework of Solow, which is still considered as the core of modern growth theory in the literature. While imposing a basic structure on a macro economic model of general equilibrium nature, the Solow framework can be applicable to both well-developed market economies and planned economies. To accommodate significant differences in total factor productivity across countries and regions efforts in the exploration of its cross-sectional implications are also welcome.

The rapid economic growth in China would have not been possible had there not been the tremendous development of a vibrant Chinese business sector. China’s businesses have experienced an early stage of gradual reform in the state sector, followed by the dramatic expansion of the rural industries and a surge in the privatization of state and collective firms. While China was becoming the most attractive destination for foreign direct investment in the process, Chinese firms in recent years have started to acquire foreign companies and attempted to build up their own brand names. To make the presence of the Chinese firms sustainable internationally, innovation and productivity improvement are crucial to their continued success abroad. Submissions in the related areas of business studies will be appreciated.

In recent years, there seems to have been a consensus between scholars of growth empirics and applied productivity analysts that improving productivity estimations and better analysis to identify determinants of the productivity performance are the two areas to which major research efforts should be devoted. One direction we suggest is the study of the “knowledge production function.” This approach is to be attractive in an empirical sense that the techniques of applied productivity analysis might be effective in investigations on the determinants of innovation and economic growth.

China’s industrialization process has basically followed the historical path of the developed nations. However, the limitation of this traditional approach is that it exerts enormous pressure on the natural environment. In many circumstances, the environmental issues can be studied under the standard framework of applied productivity analysis, which is based on well-founded economic theory of production. Submissions of papers in this area are highly recommended.

Contributions concerning productivity performance of service and agricultural sectors are also very welcome. Papers comparing China and India or Brazil, the former Soviet Union or Russia, the United States or the European Union, and South and East Asia including Japan are particularly interesting to the special issue. Studies on trade and productivity with firm heterogeneity, structural time series models of aggregate productivity, and real business cycle related productivity issues are all suitable for submission.

Papers should be submitted in Word or PDF format via email to Jinghai Zheng (Guest Editor) Department of Economics University of Gothenburg Sweden
Email: Jinghai.Zheng@gmail.com<mailto:Jinghai.Zheng@gmail.com>

Submitted papers will normally be reviewed by two independent referees as well as by the Guest Editor. Deadline for submission is 20th May 2010.