Resources Allocation and Utilization Effi ciency in China’s Healthcare Sector

The reasonable allocation of healthcare resources across different levels of healthcare facilities is the key to promoting the tiered diagnosis and treatment approach.The sudden outbreak of COVID−19 underscores the shortage of resources and service capability of China’s primary healthcare facilities.From the perspective of the vertical division of labor in the healthcare service system and based on the quality adjustment and quantitative correction of healthcare workers,this paper comprehensively calculates and analyzes the evenness of resources allocation between hospitals and primary healthcare facilities;and then,combining the theoretical model derivation with China’s empirical data test,this paper demonstrates how the misallocation of healthcare resources affects their utilization efficiency.The results are as below.(1)There are varying degrees of quantity and quality imbalance in various healthcare resources between hospitals and primary healthcare facilities.(2)When other conditions remain unchanged,the more misallocated healthcare resources are,the lower the“actual”utilization efficiency after quality adjustment is.(3)Compared with the absence of price regulation,government price regulation has led to a relative“overtreatment equilibrium”in the healthcare service market.Therefore,measures should be taken to optimize the structure of healthcare resources allocation and improve the efficiency of resources utilization,such as strengthening the government’s healthcare financing function,formulating policies that favor primary healthcare facilities,and encouraging social capital to invest at the community level.

Government Subsidies,Resource Misallocation and Manufacturing Productivity

Government subsidies for some firms will have effects on the market entry,exit and scale of firms,result in misallocation of resource between firms,and reduce manufacturing productivity.Using data of Chinese industrial enterprises from 1998 to 2007,this paper studies the effect and micro-mechanism of misallocation caused by government subsidy on manufacturing productivity.Decomposition of manufacturing productivity indicates there is resource misallocation between firms and decreasing of manufacturing productivity.Empirical study shows that government subsidies constitute an important factor inducing this resource misallocation.Subsidies change extensive and intensive margins of market,distort resource allocation between firms and reduce manufacturing productivity,and the resource misallocation is more serious in industries with higher proportion of state-owned assets.Specifically,subsidies hinder entry and exit of firms in extensive margins,with subsidized firms having lower propability of market entry and exit compared with unsubsidized firms;subsidies promote scale of subsidized firms and crowds out market share of unsubsidized firms in intensive margins.The implication of this paper is that when providing subsidies government should take into consideration their effect on the firms’dynamic and resource allocation in the frame of general equilibrium.

Business Environment and Resource Allocation Based on the Perspective of the National Value Chain

China is actively upgrading its industrial structure through industries transferring between developed and undeveloped areas;however,the overall level of the national value chain is still not high,and the asymmetric competition pattern between the upstream and the downstream has not been broken.Therefore,this paper establishes a competitive equilibrium model for the production of manufacturing enterprises,with factor price distortion,under the condition of constant returns to scale.The authors derive the relative distortion coefficients of each factor price,calculate the misallocation indices of capital and labor,and construct an industry resource misallocation measure.Furthermore,this paper applies the regional value-added decomposition model to calculate the national value chain index and matches the market index of the China Market Index Database with the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database and the Inter-Regional Input-Output Tables through quantitative analysis.From the perspective of the national value chain,the authors study the improvement effect and mechanism of the business environment on the resource allocation in industry.The study shows that industry resource allocation will be improved by 17.89%if the business environment level is improved by one standard deviation.This effect is most prevalent in the eastern and central regions,not so much in the west;the effect of downstream industries in the national value chain is higher than that of upstream industries;the improvement effect on capital allocation is higher in downstream industries than in the upstream industries;and the improvement effect on labor misallocation is basically the same in both the upstream and the downstream.Compared with labor intensive industries,capital intensive industries are more influenced by the national value chain,while the effect of upstream industries is weaker.At the same time,it is well documented that participation in the global value chain can improve the efficiency of regional resource allocation,and the construction of high-tech zones can improve resource allocation for both upstream and downstream industries.Based on the results of study,the authors propose suggestions for optimizing business environments,suiting the national value chain construction,and improving resource allocation in the future.

Local Government Debt,Sectoral Linkage and Resource Allocation Efficiency

Increasing the efficiency of resource allocation is the basis and guarantee for boosting high-quality economic development.Based on the panel data of Chinese industrial enterprises and cities from 2008 to 2013,this paper studies the influence of infrastructure construction demand shocks represented by local government debt expansion on the efficiency of sectoral resource allocation from the perspective of sectoral linkage.According to the empirical findings,local government debt significantly reduces the resource allocation efficiency of manufacturing sector that is highly related to infrastructure construction.This conclusion is still tenable after the robustness test using the simulated local government debt as an instrumental variable.Further mechanism tests show that there are two reasons for the decline of the efficiency of resource allocation in manufacturing sector that is highly related to infrastructure construction.First,more product demands and investments brought by the expansion of local government debt flow to less productive enterprises in the sector.Second,resource misallocation reduces the probability of high-productivity enterprises entering the market and low-productivity enterprises exiting the market,and the effect is more prominent in cities with high dependence on state-owned enterprises and high pressure on officials to be promoted.According to this study,the performance management of local government debt should be further strengthened,and particular attention should be paid to the influence of local government debt on enterprise investment and financing crowding out and resource misallocation.