The Impact of economic reform on productivity growth in Chinese industry: A case of Xiamen special economic zone

China's industrial and trade reforms were expected to stimulate growth in output and welfare, by increasing the capacity of industry to absorb surplus factors of production, especially labour, and by utilizing labour, capital. energy and materials more efficiently. The improvement in the productivity of factors employed in industry is hence one measure of the success of the reform policies. The impact of the special trade reform policies on productivity and growth is assessed by studies of the industrial sector overall and case studies in Xiamen and Shanghai. Beijing, which is not subject to special policy initiatives, is used as a control. Although data limitations are severe, some conclusions may be drawn. An increase in total factor productivity was found to have occurred in Xiamen following the creation of the special economic zone. This can be explained by the growth of firms jointly owned with foreign investors and collective films. In state-owned firms factor productivity fell after 1984. However, had it not been for the 1987 recession, the state-owned sector could perhaps also have achieved positive productivity growth. Productivity performance in Beijing's state-owned industry was considerably lower than that of total Xia.men industry, including state, collective and firms jointly owned with foreign investors. However, the productivity performance of state industry was almost identical in the two cities over the period 1983-88. It is possible that the apparently more liberal policy regime in Xiamen, along with a superior infrastructure, contributed to lifting productivity growth in Xiamen, even in the stateowned sector prior to 1987. The major factor in improved productivity in Xiamen, however, was the greater relative importance of joint ventures and collectively owned firms. Due to data constraints, the analysis of productivity in Shanghai was for a shorter period. Shanghai's state-owned industry did better than the state-owned sectors in either Beijing or Xiamen over this period, although factor productivity was still stagnant. In aggregate, in the three cities examined, only collective and firms jointly owned with foreign investors in Xiamen achieved positive total factor productivity growth in the l 980s. The productivity performance of the Chinese state industrial sector as a whole was very similar to that of the state-owned sector in Xiamen. The index of total factor productivity declined by 15 per cent from 1980 to 1989. At an industry level, the construction materials, chemicals. and furniture and forest products industries achieved positive total factor productivity growth, while the clothing and textiles, paper products and machinery industries experienced severe drops in total factor productivity. The major data problem confronted by this study lay in obtaining accurate disaggregated price indices to deflate the published net output series, disaggregated by industry. Disaggregated indices are not published. The estimation of total factor productivity and total factor productivity growth is extremely sensitive to e1Tors in the deflation of current to real prices of outputs and inputs. · [he results presented in this paper, pa11icularly in relation to absolute levels of total factor productivity growth, must be used with caution. Hopefully biases and etTors introduced by the use of aggregate crude price index data may not invalidate the conclusions drawn about the relative performance of, for example, state, jointly foreign owned and collectively owned firms in Xiamen, or the state-owned sectors in Xiamen, Beijing, Shanghai and nationally

Behavioural differences among Chinese firms - from the perspective of earnings determination

Firms with different ownership structure behave differently. Currently there are three major ownership structures in China’s industrial sector: state enterprises, collective enterprises, and private enterprises. Market-oriented economic reform has given great autonomy to firm managers in terms of decision making. Nevertheless, properties are still owned by different levels of governments in the case of the state and the collective sectors. This may cause a separation between the function of decision-making and riskbearing, thereby inducing firms to pursue the objectives of maximising income per capita. To understand the behavioural differences among firms under different ownership structures, this paper analyses firms’ earnings determination behaviour using a data set comprised of all three sectors. The main findings are that the state and the collective sectors behave more like Labour Managed Firms, in that they try to maximise income per worker within the firm instead of profit, whereas the private sector behaves more like capitalist firms. Further, firms with a higher degree of risk-bearing tend to pay more attention to their economic and financial performance when making decisions on how to share profit

The p68 and p72 DEAD box RNA helicases interact with HDAC1 and repress transcription in a promoter-specific manner

BACKGROUND: p68 (Ddx5) and p72 (Ddx17) are highly related members of the DEAD box family and are established RNA helicases. They have been implicated in growth regulation and have been shown to be involved in both pre-mRNA and pre-rRNA processing. More recently, however, these proteins have been reported to act as transcriptional co-activators for estrogen-receptor alpha (ERα). Furthermore these proteins were shown to interact with co-activators p300/CBP and the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme. Taken together these reports suggest a role for p68 and p72 in transcriptional activation. RESULTS: In this report we show that p68 and p72 can, in some contexts, act as transcriptional repressors. Targeting of p68 or p72 to constitutive promoters leads to repression of transcription; this repression is promoter-specific. Moreover both p68 and p72 associate with histone deacetylase 1 (HDAC1), a well-established transcriptional repression protein. CONCLUSIONS: It is therefore clear that p68 and p72 are important transcriptional regulators, functioning as co-activators and/or co-repressors depending on the context of the promoter and the transcriptional complex in which they exist

Assessing the quality of ReSPECT documentation using an accountability for reasonableness framework.

BACKGROUND: The Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment (ReSPECT) form, which supports the ReSPECT process, is designed to prompt clinicians to discuss wider emergency treatment options with patients and to structure the documentation of decision-making for greater transparency. METHODS: Following an accountability for reasonableness framework (AFR), we analysed 141 completed ReSPECT forms (versions 1.0 and 2.0), collected from six National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England during the early adoption of ReSPECT. Structured through an evaluation tool developed for this study, the analysis assessed the extent to which the records reflected consistency, transparency, and ethical justification of decision-making. RESULTS: Recommendations relating to CPR were consistently recorded on all forms and were contextualised within other treatment recommendations in most forms. The level of detail provided about treatment recommendations varied widely and reasons for treatment recommendations were rarely documented. Patient capacity, patient priorities and preferences, and the involvement of patients/relatives in ReSPECT conversations were recorded in some, but not all, forms. Clinicians almost never documented their weighing of potential burdens and benefits of treatments on the ReSPECT forms. CONCLUSION: In most ReSPECT forms, CPR recommendations were captured alongside other treatment recommendations. However, ReSPECT form design and associated training should be modified to address inconsistencies in form completion. These modifications should emphasise the recording of patient values and preferences, assessment of patient capacity, and clinical reasoning processes, thereby putting patient/family involvement at the core of good clinical practice. Version 3.0 of ReSPECT responds to these issues

Post-collisional Cenozoic extension in the northern Aegean: the high-K to shoshonitic intrusive rocks of the Maronia Magmatic Corridor, northeastern Greece

The Maronia Magmatic Corridor is a NE-trending belt of Oligocene plutons that intrudes the Kechros Dome of the northern Rhodope Core Complex in northeastern Greece. The post-collisional magmatism transitions from early high-K calc-alkaline magmatism in the NE to a younger, shoshonitic phase in the SW. We use a full suite of whole-rock geochemical analyses, including rare earth elements, to show a shared metasomatized mantle source of the magmatism. Evidence of plagioclase saturation from the onset of crystallization and amphibole-pyroxene-controlled fractionation in the high-K calc-alkaline magmatism suggest a drier (<4.75 wt% H2O) parental magma than is typical of subduction-related magmatism. Continued H2O depletion of the metasomatized source mantle resulted in the transition to a shoshonitic trend where deep crustal fractionation of an H2O-poor (< ~2 wt% H2O) magma in the absence of major olivine resulted in incompatible enrichment over a small range of SiO2. High-precision U-Pb zircon geochronology is presented here for the first time to provide chronological markers for the transition in the magmatic evolution of the Kechros dome. A 2.2 Myr break in magmatism separates the intrusion of the shoshonitic Maronia pluton at 29.8 Ma from the emplacement of the rest of the high-K calc-alkaline Maronia Magmatic Corridor between 32.9–32.0 Ma. The Maronia pluton is the hottest, driest, and youngest episode of post-collisional magmatism in the Kechros dome; we suggest that the emplacement of Maronia marks the cessation of magmatism in the northern Rhodope Core Complex as asthenospheric mantle upwelling migrated southward