Authors: Sherry Tao Kong, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, Australia National University

The global financial crisis (GFC) reduced export orders sharply and led to a decline in China’s economic growth.  As China’s exporting industries are labour intensive and most likely to employ rural migrants, it was widely believed that the GFC has had significant negative impacts on the employment and/or wages of rural migrants.

Reflecting this, at the height of the crisis, laid-off Chinese migrant workers protested outside closed factories and millions lamented lost jobs and embarked on journeys home. Read more…

Author: Sherry Tao Kong, ANU

China and Indonesia are two of the world’s largest countries. Combined, they account for nearly 30 per cent of the developing world population. Surprisingly few studies have put them side by side, even though these two Asian giants share comparable political and economic growth experiences over the past 60 years.

The initial conditions of China and Indonesia can be described as those of underdeveloped agrarian economies. Read more…

Author: Sherry Tao Kong, ANU

In December 2009 China’s Central Economic Work Conference announced policy initiatives of hukou (household registration) reform and the absorption of migrant workers into small-medium cities. Although the renewed national strategy can certainly be seen as a welcome sign to address this fundamental issue, the majority of migrants are clustered in metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The local governments in these cities will need to devise their own coping strategies to deal with the pressure and tension over limited infrastructure and resources.

Beginning last year, Shanghai and a number of other cities have started a ‘point system’ to grant ‘well-qualified’ migrant workers permanent residency. Read more…

Author: Sherry Tao Kong, ANU & Palmira Bachtiar, SMERU

Since its first stored opened in central Jakarta in 1998, Carrefour has quickly expanded to 37 stores across Indonesia, reaching annual sales of 627 million Euros by 2006. However, the rise of Carrefour has not been seamless. In 2005, Carrefour paid a Rp1.5 billion (US$148,515) fine due to its behavior deemed as abuse of its dominant market position which damaged wholesalers through ‘minus margin’. The French-owned retail giant is now once again in troubled waters.

This time, the problem started with a recent acquisition in January by Carrefour of a local supermarket operator, PT Alfa Retailindo (Alfa). Thanks to this Rp 674 billion (US$58.6 million) transaction, Carrefour acquired a 75 per cent share of Alfa, which has 29 supermarkets in Indonesia, with annual sales reaching Rp 3.6 trillion (US$310 million) in 2006.

Read more…

Author: Tao Kong

History must be a curious thing in the minds of Xiaogang villagers, Anhui province. 30 years ago, eighteen households in this village risked imprisonment by putting down their fingerprints on a secret agreement which distributed the communal land. As it turned out, this embryonic form of household responsibility system heralded the dawn of China’s economic reform. 30 years later, President Hu visited the village just before he promulgated the new land regulations, which enable farmland assigned to each rural household to be consolidated through transfer of land use rights or land lease.

The Communiqué released by the Third Party Plenum Meeting last month formally clarified the land use rights of farmers and allowed farmers to transfer and lease their land.

Although the exact details of how land reform will be implemented is anyone’s guess, the move itself is of both economic and political significance, as land issues are at the heart of China’s current reform. One can hardly think of any major challenges facing China to which land is irrelevant. This is certainly true in terms of economic, social, institutional, political and environment issues.

To make sense of this new land policy, we need to step back and look at it in the context of China’s recent shift in its development strategy. Read more…