SARS is the first deadly infectious disease of the 21st century. It started in the Chinese province of Guangdong in November 2002, and by August 2003, it had spread to 29 countries and 3 regions, with a cumulative total of 8,422 cases and 916 deaths. This paper describes the spread of the disease in Hong Kong and discusses its impact on the economy. SARS was an unexpected negative shock. The most significant negative effects were on the demand side, with local consumption and the export of services related to tourism and air travel severely affected in the short run. The economy did not experience a supply shock, as the manufacturing base in the Pearl River Delta was unaffected, and goods continued to be exported through Hong Kong normally. Initial alarmist reports and estimates about the negative economic impacts were not borne out. Fear and panic subsided quickly once the outbreak was under control, and the economy rebounded rapidly. Copyright (c) 2004 Center for International Development and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper examines the recent trends, characteristics and determinants of Japanese direct investment in China. To study these issues, we first use qualitative and survey data to compare Japanese direct investment in China with similar investment in other Asian countries. We found that within Asia, China is the largest recipient of Japanese direct investment, with Hong Kong and Thailand coming in second and third. 76.5% of Japanese direct investment in China is in manufacturing. Such concentration in manufacturing is typical for Japanese investment in developing Asia, but rather unusual compared with Japanese investment in other developed countries. Almost one-third of Japanese investment in China is in electrical machinery. 40% of Japanese firms invest in China for cost reasons, while 21% say that they invest in China to expand market shares in China. In 1999, Japanese affiliates in China procure 47% of their inputs from China and sold 47% of the goods locally in China. We also examine econometrically the determinant of Japanese direct investment in various regions of China and compare these locational factors for direct investment from Hong Kong, the largest foreign investor in China. We found that Hong Kong companies place a stronger emphasis on labor costs and a smaller emphasis on labor quality compared to Japanese multinationals. In addition, Japanese firms prefer Economic and Technology Development Zones (ETDZs) while Hong Kong firms are attracted to Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

We assess the impact of institutions on Chinese firms’ corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework. We allow the variables measuring institutions to affect the rate at which firm managers discount future investment payoffs. Applying generalized method of moments estimators to large samples of Chinese firms, we estimate the stochastic discount rates derived from actual investment and examine how they vary across institutional variables. We document robust evidence that ownership is the primary institutional factor affecting corporate investment in China. The derived discount rate for a nonstate firm is approximately 10 percentage points higher than that of an otherwise equal state firm. State firms tend to use higher discount rates to invest after they are partially privatized. We also find that firms with higher levels of corporate governance use higher discount rates to make investment.

In this paper, we examine whether hard infrastructure in the form of more highways and railroads or soft infrastructure in the form of more transparent institutions and deeper reforms lead to more foreign direct investment (FDI). We use data of FDI from the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea to various regions of China from 1990 to 2002. We control for the standard determinants of FDI--regional market sizes, wage rates, human capital and tax policies. Then we add indices of hard and soft infrastructures. We found that empirically soft infrastructure consistently outperforms hard infrastructure as a determinant of FDI. JEL classification numbers: F21, F233