Working Paper

This paper studies the impact of Government Industrial Guided Fund (GIGF) on local high-tech industrial clusters. Our findings suggest that GIGF contributes to an 8.7 percent growth of firm numbers in targeted industry-prefecture clusters within a five-year span post-implementation. We rule out the explanation that this economic benefit is driven by direct registration of firms involved in GIGF's efforts. Rather, this growth is driven by self-sustaining agglomeration dynamics: crowding in private equity investment, fostering local innovation ecosystems, and strengthening local supply chains. Critical for policymakers, a robust pre-GIGF industrial foundation and the limited involvement of government, emerge as key determinants of GIGF's success. Meanwhile, we evaluate the fiscal sustainability of GIGF. A tentative back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates a 15.9 percent annual rate of return through taxation.

We study whether strengthening legal institutions can reduce civil conflict. We develop a simple conceptual framework linking legal capacity to conflict and test its predictions using the staggered roll-out of donor-funded judicial reforms across African countries in a difference-in-differences design. We find that judicial reforms reduced conflict by about 20%, with effects that grow over time and are concentrated in high-risk subnational regions. These impacts are driven by reforms that expand access to courts, while reforms that primarily improve judicial speed or quality have limited effect. Consistent with the model, reforms reduce civil–civil conflict most strongly where state enforcement is high and and reduce civil–state conflict only where judicial independence is strong. Using GDELT and survey data, we show that reforms increase trust in courts but not in other institutions. Economic growth effects cannot account for the decline in conflict, indicating that improved dispute resolution is the primary mechanism.

I study whether pro-market reforms foster economic growth. I exploit quasi-experimental variation from the politically driven replacement of Maoist cadres with Deng Xiaoping’s technocrats in early-1980s China to measure reform intensity across provinces. Using a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design, I find that one-percentage-point increase in reform intensity raises local GDP by 1.3%, with effects that remain significant and persistent over four decades. Mechanism analysis reveals that observed growth is driven by government policy changes, the expansion of private sectors, and the improvement of local administrations, rather than by officials’ quality increases or central government transfers.

In economic history of China, there is a stigma attached to the traditional farming sector which has been commonly seen as the root course of technological backwardness, social inequality, mass poverty, class polarisation, social revolutions, and so forth. This study puts this stereotyped narrative to an acid test with reliable data from China’s first modern survey of the farming sector compiled by John Lossing Buck and his team. It re-examines the bona fide performance of China’s traditional agriculture in its ‘twilight stage’ before 1950. Thereafter, the Chinese Communists started radical programmes of collectivisation and state control over farming. Our results show that China’s traditional farming remained reasonable efficient in terms of agricultural productivity, farm wages and nutrition intake and certain growth potential remained for the sector.