WTO accession, the changing competitiveness of foreign-financed firms and regional development in Guangdong of southern China

This paper investigates the changing competitiveness of foreign-financed manufacturing firms and its implications for regional development in Guangdong province of southern China in the run-up to World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. It is argued that transnational corporations (TNCs) and some competitive, large-scale, locally-funded firms in Guangdong will triumph after WTO accession. The crowding-out process of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Guangdong will be accelerated in the near future, as they are competing directly with TNCs, and as their competitive advantages are diminishing, due to bureaucratic red tape and the rigorous enforcement of new government policies. Due to close business linkages with local privately-funded firms, the competitiveness and vitality of foreign-financed enterprises will have profound long term effects on the economic development of Guangdong, before and after WTO accession

Essays on the Chinese Skill Development System

This dissertation focuses on the Chinese vocational education and training (VET) system – an arena that recently has been gaining growing importance in Chinese economic reform. My central argument is that the Chinese state is trapped in a dilemma in which it faces two flawed choices with regards to its ongoing reform attempts to upskill the Chinese workforce in the coming decades. During the past decade, the central government has been taking steps to decentralize a school-based national skill development system and adopt a more marketized model that integrates extensive employer input. But currently neither a relatively centralized school-based system nor a decentralized employer-led model has produced the institutional conditions needed for upskilling to occur in China. In the absence of a private governance tradition, and lacking a role that proactive employer associations can play in coordinating coherent training agendas at the industry level, the skill development system has become focused only on the short-term specific needs of individual employers. The current pre-employment skill formation process downplays long-term and general skills-focused training. In this introductory chapter, I develop this argument through a review of the relevant literature. Then in the three following chapters, each of which is geared toward a separate research agenda, I identify (a) the disorganization of the VET system and (b) the skill formation dilemma in China. Chapter 2 examines subnational variation within the Chinese VET system. I find that partly because of decentralization, Chinese vocational schools have adopted four distinctive skill development patterns: the high performance model, the industry-focused model, the local market-oriented model, and the labor agency model. I argue that skill development models reflect a combination of two institutional and two organizational factors that endow each school: state support and strategies, local industrial structures, a school’s institutional legacies, and its ownership. Schools vary in these endowments, and, thus, they demonstrate differences in skill development patterns. Chapter 3 focuses on an important employer strategy that is a response to the local market labor shortage: collaboration with vocational schools. I find that driven by a major external labor market failure – the skilled labor shortage – employers seek to shift part of their traditionally firm-based training to the workforce’s pre-employment skill formation process. The decentralized VET system allows schools to customize their training programs according to the specific skill needs of collaborating firms without being bound to any industry-level standards. I call this “training for a targeted brand” model, and I argue that it is essentially an employer strategy that pursues externalization of internal labor market practices to fix the external labor market failure. Its product is a flexible reserve of students who are equipped with a considerable amount of specific skills that are valuable to a certain firm, but the firm is not bound by employment relationships to these workers. Chapter 4 compares and assesses the early outcomes of two ongoing apprenticeship reforms by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS). I find that the MOE has continued with a decentralized and disorganized approach to its reform, giving individual schools and employers complete freedom to devise a program, whereas the MOHRSS has adopted a top-down model and withheld control over the institution building process. Based on a three-level theoretical framework, I find that neither approach has generated ideal skill development outcomes, although the decentralized model has achieved relatively desirable performance. I then argue that the Chinese state has been trapped in a skill formation dilemma: until effective civil society governance is institutionalized to coordinate the VET process, the system will continue to not deliver ideal outcomes, and this will confound the state’s long-term upskilling agenda

China Brand Homes: Business history and projects¿ analysis of China Vanke Co. Ltd., 1988-2016

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

An evaluation of the factors that determine carrier selection

The selection of freight transport mode in cities like Hong Kong, with little land, is in some respects obvious. The deciding criterion for mode/carrier selection is based on the selection of either the lowest total transport cost or the shortest transit time for the cargo. The peculiar nature of each transport mode, namely; rail, sea, road and air, will definitely earn their own places when shippers need to make a decision on their shipments. The nature of the cargo will also affect the choice of carrier/mode when they are transported in break bulk. Fortunately, the invention of ISO containers in the late 1950s eliminated and overcame the shortfall in some transport modes. With the extensive usage of ISO containers hereafter, shippers can now enjoy a much freer choice of transport mode. When China started its open-door policy in the late 1970s, many local (Hong Kong) manufacturers relocated their factories to the Pearl River Delta (PRD) due to the low labour and land costs. Delivery of shipments was mainly carried out by Hong Kong freight forwarders as they had been in business with the shippers for decades. Road transport was the only mode choice available at that time due to the inflexibilities in other transport modes such as sea and rail. Progressively, these factories were relocated northwards at a later time due to the gradually increasing labour and land costs. Freight forwarders were then faced with a prolonged delivery time due to the stringent Customs regulations in China as well as a progressive increase in the physical distance between the factory and the loading port in Hong Kong. The continuous developments in adjacent ports in Southern China offered freight forwarders an opportunity to revise the route of consignments so that the lowest cost and shortest transit times were achievable. Nowadays, consignments from the PRD region can be transported to the loading ports via at least three transport modes, namely, sea (barge), road (truck) and rail. In addition to physical constraints in the mode/carrier selection, the mode choice in China is further complicated due to the inflexible Customs regulations and government policies on tax rebates. Considerable research has been done on mode and carrier selection for bulk cargo in Western countries. However there is no explicit study on the mode choice in China. This thesis studies factors that will affect the shippers’ mode/carrier choice and ascertains the unique key factors that will affect their mode/carrier choice in the PRD for their overseas consignments. From this study, it was observed that shippers irrespective of the consignment size and cargo value prefer to use a loading port that is reliable and efficienct in operation. This is the first thesis written about carrier mode choice in China applying systematic and rationale methods to express the mode selection criteria in PRD area. The results were achieved by using the pairwise comparison method - Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method so that rigidity of the results is academically accepted. Nevertheless, further study on the mode choice can be carried forward through assessing buying behaviour and the shipper-carrier relationship.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Social Innovation in Sustainable Urban Development

How can a city advance from social invention to social innovation, to attain sustainable urban development (SUD)? Many new ideas, initiatives, and showcases for social innovation have been introduced; however, project-based forms of experimentation are often just part of the ongoing urban politics (or governmentality), and consequently somewhat ephemeral, with traditional siloed city administrations remaining a central obstacle to SUD. Our Special Issue presents twelve papers that address the question of social innovation in sustainable urban development from very different angles. The contributions span issues concerning smart cities, innovation in the adaptive reuse of urban heritage, as well as policy options for regions in transition. In terms of social innovation for SUD purposes, the presented solutions range from transferable legal formalizations to the creation of urban ecosystems whose institutional structures ensure the inclusion of the civil society. Instead of a comprehensive, integrative SUD, robust sectoral solutions, or even phased solutions, are more likely to be sought

Beyond globalized visions : problematizing urban theory through spatial explorations of the Pearl River Delta

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS, STRATEGIC COUPLING AND THE DYNAMICS OF INDUSTRIAL UPGRADING IN PEARL RIVER DELTA, CHINA

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

An institutional approach to the development of the textile and clothing clusters in China: the case of Zhejiang Province

China has now become the largest producer and exporter of textile and clothing products in the world. The objective of this research is to explore the relationship between the complicated interactive process of institutional change and the development of industrial clusters in China. It focuses on the distinctive institutional factors that have allowed the textile and clothing clusters in China to benefit from globalisation while those in other transitional economies have not done so. The research also aims to make a thorough investigation into how the dynamic change of the public-private interface has influenced the development and upgrading of the textile and clothing clusters in contemporary China-in-transition, with all the political and social implications that the process entails. The research mainly uses the New Institutional Economics Approach (NIE) and gives weight to institutional change through multiple case studies of textile and clothing clusters in Zhejiang province, East China. The micro case studies are effective in illustrating the interaction between institutional change and industrial development. The research argues that the unique institutional factors leading to the rapid development of textile and clothing clusters in China include hybrid ownership, public entrepreneurship and the specialised wholesale market. The research has also shown that the theory of local state corporatism alone fails to explain the great success of textile and clothing clusters in China. The development and upgrading of textile and clothing clusters in China has witnessed extraordinary institutional change through co-evolution between the public sector and the private sector, which can be reflected through the interaction among social networks, entrepreneurship and performance of local government. The flexibility in the public-private interface is one unique endogenous institutional arrangement embedded in the economic system in China. It is a dynamic process of institutional embeddedness, deembeddedness and reembeddedness with a diversity of economic regimes coexisting at different hierarchies of governmen