This paper considers the impact of state-owned enterprises on economic growth in China. We consider several possible channels through which state-owned enterprises might play a pro-growth role: first, stabilizing growth in economic downturns by carrying out massive investments; second, promoting technical progress by investing in riskier areas of technology; third, by following a high-road approach to treating workers by paying a living wage which is favorable for China to move toward a more sustainable growth model in the future. Our empirical analysis finds that a higher share of state-owned enterprises is favorable to long-run growth and tends to offset the adverse effect of economic downturns on the regional level. JEL Classification: E11, O47, P31
Inspired by the interplay between social structure of accumulation theory and labor process theory, this paper is to specify the particular mechanism that labor institutions take in accomplishing China’s rapid capital accumulation in the reform era. The paper starts by proposing a framework to understand the relation among overtime work, labor process, and the wage gap and presents the puzzling contradiction between low wages and the need to sustain the reproduction of labor power for Chinese workers. The paper then details the bi-directional determination between the subordination of labor in the workplace and the wage gap, and further analyzes the critical conditions for the stability of the current labor institutions and sustaining capital accumulation.
This article addresses the questions of why and how precarity should be conceptualized in a Marxian framework on labor. We argue that precarity should be put back to production, which has a twofold meaning: first, we emphasize that the labor process is of crucial importance for conceptualizing precarity, and precarity in the labor process is interrelated with precarity in the labor market and labor reproduction. Second, precarity should be understood through the relationships of production, particularly through capital-labor conflict. Using one case study on Didi Kuaiche drivers in the city of Nanjing, China, we examine the nature of precarity in the flexible labor of the digital economy and present a more nuanced micronarrative of precarious work in the ride-hailing service. JEL Classification: B51, J46, J53, J80
This paper builds homogenous series of the rate of surplus value for the Chinese economy over the extended period 1956-2014 with a Marxian approach. It finds that the high profitability that stimulated capital accumulation in the decade before the 2008 crisis had relied on the continuous growth in the rate of surplus value. Given that the global crisis and changes in the domestic economy undermine all the conditions maintaining the accumulation model (an expanding external market, a relatively large reserve army of labor, and a low debt-income ratio), the rate of surplus value has failed to increase and profitability declined since 2008. Thus this paper interprets the so-called "new normal" of the Chinese economy as a stage of declining profitability that results mainly from the stagnant rate of surplus value and the rising value composition of capital.
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