China's Integration with the World: Development as a Process of Learning and Industrial Upgrading

The process of development is full of uncertainties, especially if it is a process of transition from a planned economy to a market oriented one. Because of uncertainties and country specificity, development must be a process of learning, selective adaptation, and industrial upgrading. This paper attempts to distill lessons from China's reform and opening up process, and investigate the underlying reasons behind China's success in trade expansion and economic growth. From its beginnings with home-grown and second-best institutions, China has embarked on a long journey of reform, experimentation, and learning by doing. It is moving from a comparative advantage-defying strategy to a comparative advantage-following strategy. The country is catching up quickly through augmenting its factor endowments and upgrading industries; but this has been only partially successful. Although China is facing several difficult challenges -- including rising inequality, an industrial structure that is overly capital and energy intensive, and related environmental degradation -- it is better positioned to tackle them now than it was 30 years ago. This paper reviews the drivers behind China's learning and trade integration and provides both positive and negative lessons for developing countries with diverse natural endowments, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa.patterns of trade; learning; innovation and growth

Higher order coercive inequalities and Poincare’s constants

In this thesis we discuss three projects: the optimal constant for Poincar´e’s inequality, the isoperimetric problem for Poincar´e’s constant, and the revised Adam’s inequality with its applications to Orlicz-Sobolev embeddings.Open Acces

Characterising pangolin trade in China from a social science perspective

Correction: there was a calculation error on page 117 that “778.1 kg of roasted scales during the previous year, which was estimated as equivalent to 972.6 kg of raw scales (940.8 kg from Henan hospitals and 31.8 kg from Hainan hospitals)” should be “423.0 kg of roasted scales during the previous year, which is equivalent to 528.8 kg of raw scales (403.7 kg from Henan hospitals and 19.2 kg from Hainan hospitals)”The demand for wildlife products around the world is growing rapidly according to various researches. As a result, trade in, and consumption of, wildlife products has become a major threat to global biodiversity. Pangolins are currently recognised as one of the most trafficked mammalian taxa globally, due to the high international and local demand for their products. Many recognize China as one of the biggest markets for pangolin products. Thus, its role in tackling illegal pangolin trade is a crucial responsibility for China globally. However, pangolin trade and markets in China have been little investigated in any holistic and in-depth way. My study uses social science approaches and aims to provide insights on pangolin trade and markets in China to help suggesting more effective conservation interventions. Literature, regulations, and seven online trade platforms related to pangolin trade and conservation were searched and relevant data were collected to provide background knowledge of current pangolin trade and markets in China. Fieldwork was conducted in the two Chinese provinces of Henan and Hainan from Sept 2016 to Apr 2017. Questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews, in-depth discussions with stakeholders along the pangolin trading chain were the main social science methods used in this research. Market Reduction Approaches (Schneider 2008) and Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen 1991) were used as theoretical frameworks to design the research questions. One pangolin hunter, 131 individual villagers, four villager groups (four to ten people per group), 34 reserve workers, two pangolin meat dealers, four pangolin meat consumers, five restaurant owners, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners in 41 hospitals, sellers in 134 pharmaceutical shops, two TCM wholesalers, and 2168 members of the general public were interviewed or surveyed in this study. Results show that illegal pangolin trade is widespread in the two study provinces of mainland China, especially in TCM markets, which were active both online and offline. The wild pangolin populations on Hainan Island still face threats from poaching and local demand for wildmeat. The main contributors to the widespread illegal trade were the lack of adequate law enforcement; poor awareness of trade related regulations among public and some key stakeholders; and the absence of certain key stakeholders in pangolin conservation process, such as the TCM community. Through this study, I suggest enforcement could be strengthened through increasing public participation in the process, in ways of reporting illicit trade and products. This requires enhancing public knowledge and awareness on pangolin trade and related regulations. On the other hand, to deal with the lack of representation of TCM community in pangolin conservation, their unique function and role in the overall conservation blueprint needs to be highlighted and targeted interventions are needed. In summary, achieving effective pangolin conservation in China needs close collaboration between all key stakeholders to correspondingly address the multiple types of demand on pangolin products. Methodology and insights from this study can also contribute to helping conservation in China or globally, and not only for pangolins, but for other threatened species as well

Endowment structures, industrial dynamics, and economic growth

Economic Theory&Research,Political Economy,Economic Growth,Debt Markets,Emerging Markets

Marshallian externality, industrial upgrading, and industrial policies

A growth model with multiple industries is developed to study how industries evolve as capital accumulates endogenously when each industry exhibits Marshallian externality (increasing returns to scale) and to explain why industrial policies sometimes succeed but sometimes fail. The authors show that, in the long run, the laissez-faire market equilibrium is Pareto optimal when the time discount rate is sufficiently small or sufficiently large. When the time discount rate is moderate, there exist multiple dynamic market equilibria with diverse patterns of industrial development. To achieve Pareto efficiency, it would require the government to identify the industry target consistent with the comparative advantage and to coordinate in a timely manner, possibly for multiple times. However, industrial policies may make people worse off than in the market equilibrium if the government picks an industry that deviates from the comparative advantage of the economy.Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Industrial Management,Industrial Economics,Common Property Resource Development

Coexistence for a resource-based growth model with two resources

We investigate the coexistence of positive steady-state solutions to a parabolic system, which models a single species on two growth-limiting, non-reproducing resources in an un-stirred chemostat with diffusion. We establish the existence of a positive steady-state solution for a range of the parameter $(m,n)$, the bifurcation solutions and the stability of bifurcation solutions. The proof depends on the maximum principle, bifurcation theorem and perturbation theorem