Abstract

China's manufacturing sector has been a key source of the economy's dynamism. Analysis after 2007 however is hampered by problems in the key data source for empirical analysis, the National Bureau of Statistics' (NBS) annual survey of industrial firms. Issues include missing information on value added and intermediate inputs, and concerns of over-reporting. The annual survey of firms conducted by China's State Taxation Administration (STA) provides a reliable, alternative source of firm-level data for years from 2007 to 2013. Since the sample is not representative and the precise sampling scheme is not known, the data cannot be used directly to draw inferences on China's manufacturing sector. By comparing the joint distribution of key variables for which both surveys provide reasonably reliable information, we recover the sampling scheme of the STA survey and use it to simulate samples for 2007 to 2013 that are comparable to the NBS sample in earlier years. Our estimates reveal a marked slowdown in revenue-based total factor productivity growth that cuts across all industries, ownership types, and regions. The loss of dynamism in the private sector, and the reduced contribution of firm entry to aggregate productivity growth are especially prominent.

About the Speaker

Yifan Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received B.A. and M.A. from Renmin University of China and Ph.D. from University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include Chinese economy, international trade, and economic development. His papers have appeared in refereed economics journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics and Journal of Development Economics. He has been a consultant for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. His recent research has investigated the impacts of globalization forces such as trade and FDI on the performance of Chinese firms.