The development of industrialization runs through the history of the People’s Republic of China. In the early years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union provided important help for China’s industrialization construction, capital lending, talent training and technology transfer. By analyzing the proportion of China’s industrial output value in the total output value and the output of major industrial products during the period of the Soviet Union, it shows that the assistance of the Soviet Union had a very positive role in promoting the realization of ChinaIs industrialization, and helped China to lay the foundation of industrialization. In addition, some problems in accepting the Soviet Union’s aid to China also deserve our attention when promoting the new industrialization. The research explores both the internal and external factors that led to China’s acceptance of Soviet assistance. The study examines the political, economic, and historical contexts that created a favorable environment for such aid, analyzes the various modes and scales of the assistance implemented, and presents statistical data that underscore the transformative social and economic achievements derived from this partnership. Furthermore, the paper highlights the contributions of quantitative analyses in understanding the aid’s impact, discusses the experiences and lessons learned from the Soviet aid period, and assesses the evolving dynamics of Sino—Soviet relations, particularly the gradual divergence in economic development models. The findings shed light on how Soviet aid laid the groundwork for China’s industrialization while also foreshadowing future ideological and developmental separations.

This paper examines the intricate relationship between China’s First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) and the extensive Soviet aid that played a pivotal role in shaping early industrialization and economic policy in New China. Drawing upon both Chinese and Western literature, the study reviews the evolution of planned economy practices and Soviet economic assistance, analyzes the process of plan formulation and the formulation of key industrial targets, and assesses the quantitative and qualitative impact of Soviet aid on the successful implementation of the plan. By employing a multi-perspective literature review, archival research, and statistical data analysis, the paper identifies that Soviet technology, machinery, and planning expertise contributed significantly, estimates suggest that Soviet aid accounted for 30-40% of the capital inputs in key sectors and that this collaboration was instrumental in achieving heavy industry targets before the advent of reform and opening-up policies. Furthermore, the paper explores the subsequent divergence in the economic models of China and the Soviet Union, offering lessons on dependency, technology transfer, and the political dimensions of foreign aid. The findings not only contribute to our understanding of the early stages of China’s economic development but also shed light on the broader dynamics of Cold War-era international economic cooperation.

This paper studies whether financial technology (FinTech) changes loan contract design by reducing banks’ reliance on collateral in corporate lending. Using loan-level data on Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2023 and exploiting the People’s Bank of China’s 2019 FinTech Development Plan as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks with stronger pre-policy FinTech capability significantly reduce secured lending after the policy shock. In the benchmark specification, the probability that a loan is secured falls by 1.64 percentage points, or about 2.7% relative to the baseline secured-loan share. The result is robust to alternative loan classifications, matching procedures, alternative measures of FinTech adoption, aggregated lending outcomes, and alternative inference procedures. The pattern is more pronounced among small and medium-sized enterprises, lower-tier branches, and branches located outside bank headquarters’ cities, where borrower information is likely to be more limited. Supplementary analyses are consistent with FinTech reducing banks’ information-production costs and suggest that technological proximity to FinTech-active peers may amplify the collateral-reducing effect. Overall, the evidence indicates that FinTech can enhance banks’ screening capacity and shift lending decisions away from reliance on asset-based guarantees toward information-based credit assessment.

Technology firms are often financed on narratives about products, contracts, customers, and technological progress well before these developments appear in accounting statements. We ask when such narratives become economically informative. Our central idea is that narratives should matter more once they can be linked to later verifiable outcomes rather than treated as stand-alone text.Using listed Chinese technology firms, we develop a validated corporate narrative framework for bank-affiliated investment, a setting in which investors must screen with soft information ex ante and then monitor hard realization and downside risk ex post. We use GPT-5.1 to extract business claims from management discussion, investor-relations records, exchange Q&A, and earnings-roadshow materials, and to label later claim–evidence pairs as support, partial support, conflict, duplicate, or irrelevant. We then connect these labels to official announcements, procurement awards, permits, project updates, and negative-event disclosures to construct a validated firm-month signal. The broad merged panel contains 592 firms and 30,169 firm-month observations; the main return tests use 576 firms and 18,230 firm-month observations over 2022–2024. A simple production rule that combines a low-narrative-premium component with hard-narrative and hard-event anchors, together with a separate downside-risk gate, delivers an implementable annualized long-short return of 8.93% in bank-invested firms after trading costs. The signal is much weaker in non-bank firms, predicts future gross-margin improvement more strongly than future ROE, and improves downside screening.

Against the backdrop of global green development and China’s sustainable economic transition, many firms exaggerate green-transition disclosures to cater to national strategies and capital market preferences, leading to a severe "Say–Do Gap". Based on signaling theory, this study uses the phased establishment of environmental courts in 208 prefecture-level cities as a quasi-natural experiment, adopting a staggered DID design with 2007–2023 panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms for empirical tests. Results show widespread corporate green pandering, with improved disclosure not translating into actual carbon reduction. Environmental courts effectively curb this behavior, with environmental litigation risk as the core mediating channel. Heterogeneity tests reveal stronger deterrence in regions with weaker regulation/heavier pollution and polluting firms with stronger environmental technology. This study enriches literature from a judicial deterrence perspective and provides implications for substantive corporate green transition.

Examining a cross section of seven regional Emission Trading System (ETS) and thenational ETS in China, we explore the interplay between firms and governments. We find heterogeneous adaptation among firms. Firms in regions anticipating stringentpolicies reduce emissions and invest in decarbonization technology, whereas expecta-tions of lenient policies lead to increased emissions. Meanwhile, governments set upmore stringent carbon policies when firms decarbonize more proactively. The resultsare robust to allowance allocation policies, such as cap-and-trade or tradable perfor-mance standards. Our findings underscore the importance of strategic interactionsbetween firms and governments in decarbonization.

The parking reservation systems (PRS), as an intelligent system, was adopted to address urban parking difficulties. However, the parking reservation system has not been widely adopted in China due to the reasons such as the imperfect system and the uncontrollable parking behaviour of users. This study examines the impact of users' non-compliant behaviour on intentions to reuse PRS. Non-compliant behaviours include not arriving or leaving parking spaces not as scheduled, negatively affecting subsequent users. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was expanded by adding perceived risk, social influence, and behavioral attitude. A survey involving 702 PRS users from multiple Chinese cities was conducted. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used for analysis Results show that perceived risk—such as occupied reserved spaces and extra fees from time deviations—significantly reduces behavioral attitudes and reuse intentions. Conversely, perceived usefulness, ease of use, and social influence positively influence both attitudes and reuse intentions. Importantly, the findings highlight that behavioral uncertainty, particularly users’ deviations from scheduled parking times, is a critical source of perceived risk that undermines trust and long-term engagement. Effectively managing this uncertainty through improved system flexibility and reliability is therefore essential to promoting the sustained adoption of PRS.

This paper investigates how environmental regulation induces firm digitalization. We construct a digital index based on textual analyses and find that after the implementation of the program, pilot firms' digitalization increased relative to that of a group of carefully matched control firms, which is opposite to the findings in the extant literature on technology adoption. This increase cannot be fully explained by regional unobservables, firms' own innovation, firm selection, or other policies. The results are robust when we consider firm subsidiaries. The increase in digitalization is not due to regulatory arbitrage, and the industry-level concentration of digitalization changes little.

Despite strong GDP growth and a favourable demographic profile, India faces an impending jobs crisis. A large share of the workforce remains employed in low-productivity agriculture, while many new labour market entrants are absorbed into the persistently large informal sector. By contrast, China’s rapid ascent was driven by manufacturing-led, export-oriented industrialisation, underpinned by large inflows of foreign direct investment and sustained technology transfer. India’s manufacturing base remains modest in contrast. The bulk of well-paid, formal employment continues to be concentrated in the high-skill services sector. This paper contrasts the development trajectories of these two economies and identifies several underutilised jobs-growth levers in India: manufacturing, goods exports, manufacturing-oriented foreign direct investment and innovation. All of these remain underdeveloped, yet together they offer a pathway to more labour-absorbing, durable growth. Leveraging them effectively would be central to achieving India’s ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’ ambition of attaining high-income status. The scale of India’s challenge to employ eight to ten million labour-market entrants per year implies that job creation must become an explicit policy priority. This calls for greater trade openness, particularly with Asia and Europe, to integrate India into Asia-centric global supply chains as an alternative to China. Labour market reform is equally critical, making the effective implementation of the new labour codes essential. Strengthening innovation ecosystems and realigning education and skills policies to support industrialisation are also key. Without these structural shifts, India’s current pattern of jobless growth risks transforming its demographic dividend into a long-term liability.

Capital market internationalization is widely regarded as an important pathway to improving resource allocation efficiency and enhancing governance quality, while simultaneously imposing higher requirements on corporate sustainability and social responsibility. However, its impact on firms’ internal income distribution remains subject to academic debate. This study treats the inclusion of China’s A-shares in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index as a landmark exogenous shock of capital market internationalization. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2014 to 2022, we manually compile firm-level MSCI inclusion data and construct a multi-period difference-in-differences model for empirical testing. The results indicate that firms’ inclusion in the MSCI Index significantly increases their labor income share. The mechanism analysis reveals that this promoting effect operates mainly through three channels: alleviating financing constraints, fostering innovative development, and strengthening investor governance. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is more pronounced among technology-intensive firms, firms under greater competitive pressure, and firms with higher degrees of internationalization. By incorporating income distribution outcomes into the framework of capital market internationalization, this paper enriches the evidence on the economic and social effects of internationalization and provides policy implications for emerging economies to advance high-level capital market opening and optimize income distribution.