This paper studies the behavior of China’s foreign trade in the 1980s. Chinese customs data are used to construct, for the first time, quarterly unit value and volume series that are then used to estimate foreign trade income and price elasticities. The estimated export supply price elasticities are negative and became even more negative after the reforms in 1985. The import price elasticity is very close to minus one. These results suggest that administrative controls still have a dominant effect on China’s trade and may also suggest that reforms in the management system of Chinese enterprises were not sufficient to create profit maximizing behavior by managers.

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.

Over the past 20 years, the Chinese authorities have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of their exchange and trade systems that have steadily reduced the role of planning and increased the importance of market forces. As these reforms have taken root, relative prices and domestic and foreign demand would be expected to have played a bigger role in determining trade flows. Econometric estimates of export and import equations provide evidence that trade flows have indeed become increasingly price sensitive, owing to the gradual liberalization of the trade regime over time, and to the growing shares of foreign-funded enterprises and manufactures in total trade.

Summarizes the for ward-looking analytical work program on macroeconomic issues related to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper approach. The program is evolving through a process that began with a technical workshop; participants from low-income countries, donors, academia, and civil society drafted guidance on selected issues and identified priority research topics. Partners, policymakers, and economic scholars are encouraged to share their perspectives and findings through respective team leaders, whose e-mail addresses are provided. The publication also summarizes IMF analytical work, and contains a bibliography of nearly 1,000 papers.

This title was first published in 2001. The 1980s and 1990s were not only a period in which many developing countries adopted a series of major economic policy reforms, but also an era in which all socialist countries undertook varying degrees of radical reforms in their Soviet-style central-planning economic management systems. This volume examines the performance of China's industrial reform and open-door policy during the period of 1980-1997 through conducting a case study on one of its Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Xiamen. It adopts an analytical approach - examining Xiamen's performance from the perspective of three important interactions: between the country's general economic reform policies and the Special Policy implemented in the SEZs; between the Xiamen SEZ and the vast Chinese hinterland; and between foreign (especially Taiwanese) direct investment and local industrial transformation.