A seminar by Professor Xiaodong Zhu from University of Hong Kong
The China Economy Program, will be hosting Professor Xiaodong Zhu (Chair Professor and Area Head of Economics at HKU, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto) for a Crawford seminar.
Title: Bottom-up institutional change and growth in China
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of bottom-up reforms in driving China's economic growth. Leveraging granular documentation from county-level gazetteers, we identify local reform events from 1976 to 2005, capturing de facto policy innovations and their diffusion. Our findings show that bottom-up reforms primarily drive growth through productivity improvements, while centrally sponsored reforms operate mainly through capital accumulation. Evidence from firm entry and structural transformation further corroborates the productivity-enhancing effects of bottom-up reforms. Notably, these reforms were more likely to originate in politically peripheral regions and the diffusion of these reforms was more driven by local conditions than centrally sponsored reforms.
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