The impacts of business environmental factors on operations strategy choices in a manufacturing context have been heavily researched. However, how managers of service firms in developing countries such as China develop operations strategy has yet to receive any significant attention among researchers. Drawing on the manufacturing literature, we examine, in the Chinese context, the relationships between business environmental factors (such as business cost, competitive hostility, labour availability, and environmental dynamism) and operations strategy choices (such as low cost, quality, flexibility and delivery performance). Employing a path analytic framework, we have identified strong linkages between business environment (viz.: business cost, competitive hostility and environmental dynamism) and operations strategy choices. We have found that environmental dynamism (such as changes in retail technology and innovations in new service development) had the strongest influence on the degree of emphasis placed on operations strategy choices. However, environmental concerns about labour availability do not appear to have any direct effect on the operations strategy selections among retail firms in China.

The Article first presents a brief history or survey of some of the earlier problems that associate with China’s banking and financial institutions. The Article then addresses specific problems, in the context of the rules, procedures, and practices of the banking and finance sector, which widely range from non-performing loans, to China’s money market and interbank lending business. These problems also directly associate with the liberalization of the banking and finance sector of the economy, and the requirements of both the WTO rules and China’s WTO Protocol on accession. The Article also briefly explores the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and its contagion effect throughout the world, including the Asian region. In the context of China and the subprime crisis, the Article summarizes some of the problems that associate with China banking and financial institutions, by focusing on the policy implications of the history of banking and finance in China, and what this means in terms of both WTO compliance and greater liberalization of banking and financial institutions, especially pursuant to the WTO GATS, as service industries. All of this, eventually, allows for the presentation of certain conclusions concerning China banking and finance in the new era of a global subprime crisis.

Comprehensive data on corporate announcements of Chinese firms allows us to examine the preference for, and determinants of, cash and stock dividends. The results indicate that Chinese public investors prefer stock dividends over cash dividends, which are preferred by large state and legal person shareholders generally. Stock dividends, which do not require an explicit cash outflow from a firm, are found to be positively related to higher earnings, supporting the signalling hypothesis of dividend policy. In an imperfect market, these results have some implications for government regulation of financial markets.

During the reform era, the Chinese government has been carrying out strategic industrial policies modelled on those in post-war Japan and South Korea, in the hope of transforming its highly fragmented manufacturing sector into one that comprises a small number of internationally competitive big businesses. Using the evolution of the Chinese steel industry structure from the late 1980s to the early 2000s as a case in point, this paper finds that the Chinese government's consolidation attempts have, by and large, not been very successful. The disappointing policy outcome is interpreted by a detailed examination of the industry policy mechanism in China. It is concluded that the institutional framework of the Chinese state differs from its counterparts in Korea and Japan in some fundamental aspects. Among these, the fragmented and uncoordinated Chinese bureaucracy contributes significantly to the inefficacy of policy implementation.

In China, regional disparities are important. We examine the difference in the sensitivity of investment to cash flow between firms in inland regions and those in coastal regions. By using the financial data of Chinese listed firms, we found that firms in inland regions rely more on their internal funds in terms of their investment activities than those in coastal regions and that the sensitivity gap between inland and coastal firms widened in the recent contractionary monetary policy period. This suggests that firms in inland regions are harder to obtain outside funds due to unfavorable social and economic environments for inland firms. Our findings suggest that capital markets in China respond rationally to the potential impact of regional disparities on a firm’s performance.

This article tests several predictions of tournament theory on executive compensation in the context of a transition economy. Using an unbalanced panel which consists of a total of 34701 executives in 450 publicly listed firms in China during 1999 and 2006, we find that (1) pay increases as executives move up the corporate hierarchy into higher ranks; (2) pay gap is the largest between the first and second tier executives, although it does not increase monotonically across all executive ranks; and (3) pay dispersion increases with the number of tournament participants and the level of noise in the business environment. In addition, we find evidence that state ownership of shares reduces executive compensation and pay gap, and corporate governance structure affect pay dispersion. Overall, our study shows that listed firms in China, as they become more and more market-oriented, have adopted a pay structure that is largely consistent with the predictions of tournament theory, and that it is important to consider both ownership structure and corporate governance in analyzing executive compensation structure.

In recent years China has faced an increasing trilemma - how to pursue an independent domestic monetary policy and limit exchange rate flexibility, while at the same time facing large and growing international capital flows. This paper analyzes the impact of the trilemma on China's monetary policy as the country liberalizes its goods and financial markets and integrates with the world economy. It shows how China has sought to insulate its reserve money from the effects of balance of payments inflows by sterilizing through the issuance of central bank liabilities. However, we report empirical results indicating that sterilization dropped precipitously in 2006 in the face of the ongoing massive buildup of international reserves, leading to a surge in reserve money growth. We estimate a vector error correction model linking the surge in China's reserve money to broad money, real GDP, and the price level. We use this model to explore the inflationary implications of different policy scenarios. Under a scenario of continued rapid reserve money growth (consistent with limited sterilization of foreign exchange reserve accumulation) and strong economic growth, the model predicts a rapid increase in inflation. A model simulation using an extension of the framework that incorporates recent increases in bank reserve requirements also implies a rapid rise in inflation. By contrast, model simulations incorporating a sharp slowdown in economic growth lead to less inflation pressure even with a substantial buildup in international reserves.

The global financial crisis is hitting China hard with great adversity. In response, China start to formulated the plan for dealing with the financial crisis and its possible fallout in June 2008 when China was in the critical stage of putting up the Olympic Games. The Chinese leadership judges the crisis is going to be a serious disaster but not as bad as the great depression of the 1930s. An America-type crisis is unlikely to happen in the country and the main threat would be the Chinese real sector being dragged down under, which in turn sparks a crisis in the financial sector. China’s strategy for combating the crisis therefore is to deal with the immediate crisis effects in the real economy in the first place, and looks for opportunities in the meantime. The overwhelming emphasis is placed on expanding domestic demand to fuel growth. Following this strategy, China has rolled out a comprehensive package of combating measures. The fiscal expansion hit the headlines with extensive government financial support for infrastructure and public service projects. Yet the Chinese monetary stimulus is actually more powerful. The stance of Chinese monetary policy has changed from being precautionary against inflation with flexibility to appropriate easing to promote growth. After several rounds of rate cuts, the Chinese version of quantitative easing takes the central stage. In China’s battle with the financial crisis, the monetary stimulus is playing a leading role at the moment. The international dimensions of China’s monetary policy typify how China turns a crisis into a world of opportunity. China has taken a conservative approach to managing her reserves in which the huge international reserves are taken as self insurance rather than an avenue for international leverage. Within this framework and if safety of these foreign assets can be assured, China can provide finance to countries in crisis through international financial organisations. In addition to the Panda Bonds, the chief way for China to make funding contribution is through IMF. For this matter, China supports the motion to increase the IMF’s lending capacity and would buy the bonds it issues. China is actively calling for reform of international financial architecture. Chinese advisers have publically argued that the increase in China’s funding contribution has to be paralleled by an increase in China’s profile in the power structure in the IMF. In many occasions, China has also acted as spokesman of the emerging and developing economies by making cases for increasing their say in world financial affairs. But on the whole, China has been cautious not to committing herself too much as she knows probably she has little to gain from international policy coordination. Against this backdrop, China has chosen to focus on regional financial cooperation proactively and considerable progress has been made in this area. China’s dealing with the current financial crisis is unassuming. What she has done is down-to-earth common sense. However, the Chinese approach is shown signs of working. Despite the early success of crisis handling, there remain fundamental problems in China’s structure of economic growth. How to redress structural imbalances in the economy, to boost domestic demand, to calm down the property market and, above all, to create millions of jobs, are still the major huge challenges China is facing.

This paper sheds new light on the external and domestic dimension of China's exchange rate policy. It presents an open economy model to analyze both dimensions of macroeconomic adjustment in China under both flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. The model-based results indicate that persistent current account surpluses in China cannot be rationalized, under general circumstances, by the occurrence of permanent technology or labor supply shocks. As a result, the understanding of the macroeconomic adjustment process in China requires to mimic the effects of potential inefficiencies, which induce the subdued response of domestic absorption to permanent income shocks causing thereby the observed positive unconditional correlation of trade balance and output. The paper argues that these inefficiencies can be potentially seen as a by-product of the fixed exchange rate regime, and can be approximated by a stochastic tax on domestic consumption or time varying transaction cost technology related to money holdings. Our results indicate that a fixed exchange regime with financial market distortions, as defined above, might induce negative effects on GDP growth in the medium-term compared to a more flexible exchange rate regime.

汇率制度的改革一直是发展中国家与国际接轨的核心业务。中国现行汇率制度的最大特点是由多种货币构成的，因此从理论上讲，人民币有效汇率更能真实反映人民币在国际贸易中的总体竞争力和实际购买力的综合状况。本文介绍了基于ESTAR结构的KSS非线性单位根检验分析法，并连同ADF和PP检验一起对我国实际有效汇率进行了实证，KSS检验结果表明，非线性过程更为有效的体现了实际有效汇率的波动过程，我国实际有效汇率符合购买力平价理论。这说明现有的参考一篮子货币进行调节的有管理的浮动汇率制度正逐步达到市场有效性。