High-level Equilibrium Research Articles

Research on Territorial Spatial Development Non-Equilibrium and Temporal–Spatial Patterns from a Conjugate Perspective: Evidence from Chinese Provincial Panel Data

Clarifying the intrinsic nature and formation mechanisms of the territorial spatial development non-equilibrium, optimizing the allocation of territorial resources, promoting regional balanced development, and alleviating regional development disparities have become common endeavors of all countries seeking to enhance development quality. This study, based on the land use and socio-economic data of 31 provinces and cities in China from 2006 to 2020, utilized the kernel density estimation method and ArcGIS spatial analysis to explore the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of China’s territorial spatial development non-equilibrium. The research findings are as follows: (1) From 2006 to 2020, both the land development intensity and land supply capacity showed an increasing trend, with increases of 21.4% and 8.03%, respectively. However, their spatiotemporal evolutions significantly differed. (2) The state of the territorial spatial development non-equilibrium in China significantly improved, with a rising trend in the territorial spatial equilibrium degree. Regional disparities in the territorial spatial equilibrium degree decreased. The number of provinces and cities in a state of underdevelopment decreased from 23 to 8, while the number in an equilibrium state increased from 7 to 21. The central and western regions showed more significant improvements in the territorial spatial equilibrium degree and a greater reduction in regional disparity when compared to the eastern and northeastern regions. (3) China exhibited distinct regional disparities in the territorial spatial equilibrium degree. The overdeveloped areas were Beijing and Shanghai. The underdeveloped regions were primarily concentrated in western areas, including Sichuan, Yunnan, and Xinjiang. The high-level equilibrium regions were predominantly located in the southeastern coastal provinces and the central plains region, while the low-level equilibrium regions included Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Qinghai, and the three northeastern provinces. (4) From the perspective of the number of agglomeration types, the order is HH (high–high) > LH (low–high) > LL (low–low) > HL (high–low), and China’s TSED exhibits a spatial proximity peer effect. The innovation of this study consists of the following aspects: (1) The clarification of the fact that the essence of equilibrium does not require an exact 1:1 match, as with “two horses”; rather, it entails the maintenance of a slight surplus of land supply capacity over land development intensity. This approach allows the possibility of future sustainable development by leaving room for expansion. (2) The differentiation between high-intensity conjugation (in terms of both quantity and quality) and low-intensity conjugation (quantity only) from a conjugate perspective. This categorization aids in a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the territorial spatial development non-equilibrium and its spatiotemporal patterns. It provides crucial information for the formulation of sustainable national territorial development plans and the promotion of a regional development equilibrium.

Breakthrough Path of Low-Level Equilibrium of China's Policy-Oriented Financing Guarantee Market.

Policy-oriented financing guarantee schemes are widely adopted in the world to alleviate the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises. However, the development level of policy-oriented financing guarantee market in China has not reached the desired high-level equilibrium target, even though governments have issued a series of guiding policies. Accordingly, based on the evolutionary game theory, this study establishes and analyzes the game model between local governments, guarantee institutions, and banks. Then, the breakthrough effects of different paths on the low-level equilibrium of the guarantee market are simulated. The results show that strengthening superior government's performance appraisal intensity can only partially delay the “window period” of the low-level equilibrium, while adjusting local governments' compensation coefficients or increasing banks' risk sharing ratio have further synergistic effects on the realization of the high-level equilibrium. Additionally, dynamic reward and penalty mechanism of the local governments can effectively restrain the unbalanced state of financing guarantee market caused by banks' excess compensation risk, and finally impel the stabilization of the high-level equilibrium state.

Research on the Evolution Path of China’s Provincial Innovation Chain Model Based on Complex Network Model

By constructing a complex network analysis model, this paper analyzes the data of 31 selected provinces in China from 2010 to 2019, summarizes China’s provincial innovation chain development model, and then combined with the time series analyzes the evolution path of the model. The research shows that there is certain group proximity in China’s provincial innovation chain in each year, and there are eleven models in ten years. The evolution path of the provincial innovation chain development model is mainly manifested in the development trend of low-level to medium-level and then high-level equilibrium model. Increasing investment and improving efficiency are the leading driving force for the development of China’s provincial innovation chain. The medium-level equilibrium model runs through almost all years. Taking this as the node, the innovation driving force gradually changes from high investment to high efficiency.

Factor endowments, vent for surplus and involutionary process in rural developing economies

ABSTRACT This article seeks to provide a new analytical framework based on factor endowments to understand growth in rural economies without structural transformation. More concretely, it explores the variation in farmers’ ability to respond to new commercial opportunities. To complement the extensive literature on the economic and institutional effects of factor endowments, this paper revisits two influential yet controversial theories: Mark Elvin’s high-level equilibrium trap for areas with high population densities in a closed arable frontier, and Hla Myint’s vent for surplus for areas with surpluses of land and labour. We argue that these become more operational if reinterpreted by Boserupian land intensification processes. By lifting the neo-classical constraints on factor relationships, this paper contributes by exploring the mechanisms by which factor endowments might preclude the transformation. Understanding the different dynamics of cultivation in relation to land and labour use, technological choices, saving capacity, and potential linkages to industrialization becomes of even greater significance as these areas may be found within the same countries at a given time.

The Long-term Effect of Industrial Investment：Evidence from the Anti-Japanese War

Developing economy to get rid of poverty is the common goal of all low-income countries. For many developing countries, small-scale markets and inadequate incentives for private investment are key reasons for economic stagnation. Therefore, these governments often invest directly in the industrial sectors of specific regions or industries, expecting that such industrial policies can promote industrialization and accelerate economic growth. Considering the scope economic characteristics of the industrial sector, the industrial policy of governmental direct investment can make the economy jump from low-level equilibrium to high-level equilibrium. In practice, the policy effect also depends on a series of constraints faced by a country, and these constraints are endogenous to the past economic structure, which means that quantitative research based on the historical perspective is of great significance. It helps to identify the key elements for development and provides empirical support for policy implications.The difficulty in identifying the long-term effect of industrial policies is that the areas of industrial investment are not randomly selected. In order to achieve causal inference, this paper exploits the long-term effect of the quasi-natural experiment of Anti-Japanese War on the economic development of the rear area. By sorting out historical data files, the county-level industrial database of ten provinces during the Anti-Japanese War is constructed, and the data are matched with the contemporary economic and social development data in the same geographical space. Then, using the regression model, the long-term performance of industrial investment in history is estimated. The main findings are as follows: First, the more the number of industrial enterprises in the county from 1942 to 1945, the higher the level of economic development in the new China period, but the effect is gradually weakening with time. Second, the industrial investment in the rear area of modern times has a positive effect on the long-term economic development through path dependence and initial material capital accumulation. In history, the higher the industrial investment, the higher the degree of industrialization, but there is no significant difference in the production efficiency of industrial enterprises. Third, historically, areas with more industrial investment can attract more people to move in and have a higher urbanization rate, but this historical basis does not significantly affect rural related variables, such as infant mortality rate and net income of rural residents.The long-term research based on historical events provides a new perspective for the formulation of industrial policies. The case of Anti-Japanese War shows that industrial investment against comparative advantage will cause efficiency loss in the short term, but may bring a positive effect in the long term. This raises a new intertemporal trade-off problem for policymakers about the present and the future, whose subjective time discount rate is the key to solving the problem. In addition, the quantitative history study also reminds us that one should fully recognize the initial conditions of regional development before policy implementation, which means that one can neither copy the experience of other countries nor simply reverse what policies are needed from development goals. Instead, one should be more aware of what policies are really feasible under current constraints.

Analysis of Railway Network Accessibility in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Based on Space Syntax

The study abstracts the 26 main cities of urban agglomeration in Yangtze River Delta as convex space, and constructs a convex drawing based on the passenger railway network of 2008, 2018, and 2030 in Yangtze River Delta with Depthmap. After calculating the network integration and intelligibility, the relationship between the development of the railway network and the spatial structure change of urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River Delta are analysed and it finds that: (1) The development of the ordinary railway network is relatively slow and uncoordinated, while the high-speed railway network is developing rapidly and co-ordinately. (2) The spatial layout of railway network accessibility develops from the circle structure to the point-axis structure, and then to the multi-core structure. As a whole, the overall network development becomes increasingly mature and balanced, but the small-scale networks of local area become more differentiated. (3) As the development of multiple cores, the network accessibility has changed from low-level equilibrium period to an unbalanced period and then to a high-level equilibrium period.

Uneven Distribution of Primary and Middle Schools: A Case Study of Changchun, China

Providing further knowledge to and refinement of public facility location theory, this paper focuses on the distribution of basic educational facilities in China. The aim towards an equilibrium in the distribution of education resources has captured widespread attention in recent years. The basis of an education equilibrium is the balanced distribution of teaching facilities. Using the spatial analysis function of ArcGIS, this article discusses the evolution characteristics of education equilibrium and explores its dynamics with reference to primary and middle schools in Changchun City, Jilin Province from 2007 to 2013. The study found the spatial distribution of primary and middle schools in Changchun was uneven and the characteristic of close internal but sparse external has not changed. Low-level equilibrium of primary and middle schools in Changchun has been basically realized, but high-level equilibrium is far from being realized. Although there has been a trend towards suburbanization of these schools in recent years, the high entrance threshold has determined that high-quality school opportunity (schools with high-level resource allocation) has not increased for people. The spatial distribution of primary and middle schools is related to the factors of population, real estate, transportation and the education system itself. Education space, living space, and traffic space all interact and together affect urban spatial structure.

A Canonical 3-D P53 Network Model that Determines Cell Fate by Counting Pulses

DOI: 10.26650/electrica.2018.02664 From a system theory perspective, p53 network dynamics is interesting since it can exhibit three dynamical modes of p53, namely low-level equilibrium, oscillation, and high-level equilibrium. Each of these modes are associated with different cell fate outcomes: cell survival, cell cycle arrest, and apoptosis. The literature reveals that a high level (apoptosis) is seen only after ending the oscillation phase, so called two-phase dynamics, which provides the decision of apoptosis depending on the oscillation duration. This paper proposes that a negative feedback can keep time by counting the pulses of oscillation to take the decision of apoptosis or cell survival. P53DINP1, which is the mediator of this feedback, is added as a variable to a 2-D oscillator model of the p53 network. The resulting canonical 3-D model successfully replicates the two-phase dynamics. That is, it possesses temporary oscillatory behavior, in which first oscillations (first phase) and then high level state (second phase) are observed. By introducing a new variable to the core oscillator in the p53 network, this study demonstrates that p53 network can be considered a modular structure, which consists of an oscillator and other variables that control this oscillator to contribute to cell fate determination.

Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era by J. D. La Fleur, and: Rice: Global Networks and New Histories ed. by Francesca Bray et al.

Reviewed by: Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era by J. D. La Fleur, and: Rice: Global Networks and New Histories ed. by Francesca Bray et al. Rachel Laudan Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era. By j. d. la fleur. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 214pp. $144.00 (hardcover). Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. Edited by francesca bray, peter a. coclanis, edda l. fields-black and dagmar schäfer. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 421pp. $99.00 (hardcover). For at least the last ten thousand years and probably much longer, most people have depended for most of their calories on a primary starchy staple, usually prepared from a grain or a root. Secondary starches have provided a backup in case of crop failure and in the lean time before the harvest of the primary starch. Besides being fundamental to health, food security, and culture, these staples, so laborious to farm and process, were integral to the distribution of labor, to divisions between subsistence and market agriculture, and to economic growth or lack of it. Changing how familiar staples were produced or processed, or shifting to a new staple, even if this promised a more secure or more appealing diet, was never undertaken lightly. Such changes are central to, if not always carefully analyzed in two widely-discussed issues in the history of the modern world. The first is the Columbian Exchange, the transfer of living things, plants included, between the Old World and the New, described by Alfred Crosby in The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1973), and frequently assumed to have precipitated rapid dietary change and population growth. The second is the question of why the West industrialized in the nineteenth century, when China and other non-western civilizations apparently failed to do so. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the answer was framed in terms of Clifford Geertz’s Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological [End Page 302] Change in Indonesia (1963), in which he argued that rice farming could be intensified almost indefinitely, increasing production per area at the cost of keeping production per worker the same, and thus leading to economic stagnation. The environmental historian Mark Elvin extended this analysis to China in The Pattern of the Chinese Past (1973) suggesting that China had fallen in to a “high-level equilibrium trap.” Both Fusion Foodways and Rice address the Columbian Exchange, while Rice also takes on the Involution hypothesis. To begin with exchange, in Fusion Foodways, La Fleur focusses on the introduction of maize, Asian rice, plantains, and cassava to southern Ghana between 1482 when the Portuguese established a fort at Elmina and 1850 when the Atlantic era tilted over to the colonial period. Faced with a sparsity of written sources, a lack of physical remains thanks to the climate, oral traditions directed as much at present concerns as at representing the past, and a still-scanty literature on plant genetics, La Fleur turned to language. From early European books and manuscripts and current usage, he collected food names in five different vernaculars, concentrating on loan words for unfamiliar crops and adapted words for new crops similar to ones already in cultivation. As a preliminary, La Fleur reviews the thousands of years of African experiments with different foraged, gardened, and eventually farmed crops. Only in the last hundred years before the arrival of the Portuguese did the local people finally settle on African rice, millet, sorghum, or yam as their main staples, selecting one or more depending on local conditions and their need to minimize or reduce both labor and risk of crop failure. Each staple was processed into one or more basic staple foods, the most prestigious being fufu, a dish of cooked, pounded yam. Thus the locals, particularly women, were already experienced in the arduous work that went into the adoption of a new crop. This involved trial plantings in gardens, breeding to adapt the crop to local environmental conditions and cultural expectations, and developing ways to process and cook the plants into appetizing dishes. Plantains which are propagated by cuttings not seeds, were one of the...

Low-level versus high-level equilibrium in public utility services

Heterogeneity of public utility services is common in developing countries. In a “high-level” equilibrium, the quality of utility services is high, consumer willingness to pay for services is high, the utility is well funded and staff well paid in order to induce high quality of performance. In a “low-level” equilibrium the opposite is the case. Which alternative occurs depends on both the quality of utility management, and public perceptions about service quality. If a utility administration has the potential to offer high-quality service, and the public is aware of this, high-quality equilibrium also requires the public's service payments to be high enough to fund the needed pay incentives for the utility staff. When the public lacks knowledge about the utility administration's quality, the public's initial beliefs about the utility administration's quality will also influence their willingness to pay sufficiently for a high-quality equilibrium to be realized. This paper shows that, with low confidence, only a low-level equilibrium may exist; while with higher initial confidence, a high-level equilibrium becomes possible. “Intermediate” (in between the low- and high-level) outcomes can also occur, in early periods, with “high-level” outcomes later on.

Strategic complementarities between innovative firms and skilled workers: The poverty trap and the policymaker’s intervention

Abstract The economy under study is populated by two types of firms (innovative and not) and two types of workers (skilled and unskilled). The aim is to develop a model that confirms the existence of complementarities between innovative firms (R&D activities) and skilled workers (human capital) and traces corresponding optimal dynamics. Workers follow an imitative behavior to choose their action type (skilled or unskilled). As the share of innovative firms is large enough, then the share of skilled workers in equilibrium depends on the reviewing rate (of imitation) for those unskilled workers. The policy maker intervention is justified only for a certain time by reducing the threshold to reach the high-level equilibrium, but once the economy is in a path for a high-level equilibrium such an intervention may stop.

Democratic Consolidation in East Asia

In this article, we attempt to describe how ordinary people in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan view democracy and its authoritarian alternatives and how they experience institutional practices of their democracies to determine the extent of cultural and institutional democratization. The analysis of the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data shows that although the citizens of East Asian democracies unequivocally reject military authoritarian rule, they are ambivalent toward civilian authoritarian rule, and are not yet fully committed to democracy. The analysis also shows that they are not satisfied with the provision of civil rights and institutions of horizontal accountability, but remain highly satisfied with voting rights, which suggests that East Asian democracies are not adequately liberal, though unmistakably electoral, in the eyes of ordinary people. On the basis of this finding, we conclude that East Asian democracies fail to achieve a high-level equilibrium between the popular demand for democracy and the institutional supply of democracy.

Fractal poverty traps

This paper offers an informal theory of a special sort of poverty trap, one in which multiple dynamic equilibria exist simultaneously at multiple (micro, meso and/or macro) scales of analysis and are self-reinforcing through feedback effects. Small adjustments at any one of these levels are unlikely to move the system away from its dominant, stable dynamic equilibrium. Governments, markets and communities are simultaneously weak in places characterized by fractal poverty traps. No unit operates at a high-level equilibrium in such a system. All seem simultaneously trapped in low-level equilibria. The fractal poverty traps formulation suggests four interrelated strategic emphases for poverty reduction strategies.

Geography and Poverty Traps

We test the view that the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in the intrinsic geography of each country against the alternative view that there are poverty traps. We reject simple geographic determinism in favor of a poverty trap model with high- and low-level equilibria. The high-level equilibrium state is found to be the same for all countries while income in the low-level equilibrium, and the probability of being in the high-level equilibrium, are greater in cool, coastal countries with high, year-round, rainfall.

Education, trade and investment liberalizations

Empirical evidence suggests a two-way causality between skilled labor and inward direct investment. I construct a general equilibrium model that allows for endogenous firm and plant-location decisions and the endogenous accumulation of skilled labor. I examine the effect of an education subsidy when trade is liberalized and investment is restricted and vice versa. For an initially skilled-labor-scarce country, I show that an education subsidy under investment liberalization can jump the economy to a high-level equilibrium, and that it may be possible to remove the subsidy completely and remain at the superior equilibrium.

The division of labor and the growth of government

This paper develops a dynamic, general equilibrium model of specialization-driven growth in which private coordination costs are decreasing in public expenditure on physical and institutional infrastructure. The model provides an explicitly economic explanation of the secular rise of government. In addition, endogenous specialization decisions imply the existence of four development stages, characterized by distinct outcomes regarding the division of labor, the role of government and the return to capital. Growth is characterized by capital accumulation, market integration, the division of labor and the growth of government. The effectiveness of government plays a central role in determining whether an economy converges to a high or low level equilibrium.

Human capital, technological progress and the demographic transition*

We emphasize the importance to consider components of population growth — fertility and mortality ‐ separately, when modeling the mutual interaction between population and economic growth. Our model implies that two countries with the same population growth will not converge towards the same level of per capita income. The country with the lower level of birth and death rates will be better off in the long run. Introducing a spill over effect of average human capital on total productivity our model implies multiple equilibria as illustrated in Becker el al. (1990) and Strulik (1999). Besides the existence of a low and high level equilibrium ‐ as characterized by low and high levels of per capita output respectively ‐ we show the existence of multiple low level (Malthusian) equilibria. Initial conditions and parameters of technological progress and human capital investment determine whether an economy is capable to escape the low level equilibrium trap and to enjoy sustained economic growth.

Why China failed to create an endogenous industrial capitalism

Weber almost anticipated the idea of the high-level equilibrium trap. Speaking about bureaucracy, he observed that “as always in the area of'techniques' ... advance proceeded most slowly wherever older structural forms were in their own way technically highly developed and functionally particularly well-developed to the requirements at hand.” , 987. It is a pity that he did not utilize this insight to analyze what he called the “increasing stability of the economic situation under conditions of the economically self-sufficient and socially homogenously composed world-empire of China.” , 137. Instead he pursued the idea that the absence of self-generated capitalism in China was due “basically” to “the lack of a particular mentality.” , 104. This inappropriate mentality had several aspects. One was the “personalist principle.” , 236. Others are listed in a catalog of alleged traits of personality taken largely from Arthur Smith's Chinese Characteristics. , 231–32. Cp. ibid. 235-39. See Arthur Smith, (New York: Reveil, 1900). They include stolidity, patience, dislike of novelty, absence of curiosity, credulity, and a general distrust of and dishonesty towards all. Having acknowledged China's “considerable technical endowments” and ‘“inventions’” (Weber's own quotation marks), , 199. he argued that “the magic stereotyping of technology and economics... completely precluded the advent of indigenous modern enterprises in communication and industry.” , 199. The Chinese world, in a famous phrase, was “a magic garden” in which “the ethical rationality of the miracle [was] out of the question.” , 200. Certain points of detail may be disputed. Thus the miracles attributed to the piety of sons and the fidelity of widows were entirely ethically rational. Mark Elvin, “State Sponsorship of Private Virtue in Imperial China,” (forthcoming, autumn, 1984). But the crucial fact is that this conception of the problem led Weber in practice to place an excessive faith in the explanatory power of an analysis of ideas considered in relative isolation from their socioeconomic context. It probably also weakened his sense of the need to sort out more systematically the somewhat internally contradictory opinions that he held on the more specifically economic aspects of Chinese society.

Development of Underdevelopment or Underdevelopment of Development in China

These comments are not by a China specialist but come from someone who has been concerned with world capitalist development and the development of underdevelopment within it. In the comments that follow, therefore, the evaluation of the content of Lippit's argument about China will largely be left to the China specialists; while here we will concentrate on the construction of the argument about the development of underdevelopment. To begin with, we may question whether the title Mr. Lippit chooses for his essay is even appropriate for the argument he constructs. Mr. Lippit does well in examining the theses that are obscurantist than explanatory (as he terms one of them, though the same term applies equally to the others), and he does more than well to reject them on grounds of their lack of scientific foundation. In their universal versions (and also their applications to other case studies) the Rostowian stage theory beginning with traditional society, the Parsonian (pseudo-Weberian) theory of pattern variables including family structure and culture, the Leibensteinian low- and Schultzian high-level equilibrium trap theory, and the Nurskian-Myrdalian vicious circles have all long since shown to be a-, indeed anti-, historical and therein akeady scientifically unacceptable as vehicles for the explanation of any social process and development (and non- or under