China's cross-border e-commerce industry has demonstrated stable and rapid development thanks to the implementation of appropriate policy support and the progressive establishment of e-commerce platforms. The industry's prosperity suggests unique advantages of cross-border e-commerce, which are a result of promoting industrial transformation and accelerating economic restructuring. Due to asymmetric information and insufficient data, little research has been conducted on the current status and the trends of the industry as well as the magnitude of risk in cross-border e-commerce. Using the cross-border e-commerce hosting service database of BizArk, the present study has constructed an index for China's export e-commerce prosperity and magnitude of risk which reveals that the industry: (i) generally presents a tendency of solid growth; (ii) has had a relatively stable situation for logistics facilitation but a drastic fluctuation in customs facilitation; (iii) has gradually shifted to competing for cheaper and more efficient marketing techniques as well as channels; and (iv) has experienced a remarkable amelioration of risk magnitude.

Coresidence between elderly parents and their married adult children is common in East Asian societies. We analyze theoretically and empirically with which adult child parents coreside when the extended family has multiple adult children, and we show that this decision-making process can be rationalized. Specifically, we find evidence that suggests division of labor among family members through the choice of coresidence. Theoretically, we show that when parents can help children with housework, they will coreside with higher-educated children whose opportunity cost of housework is higher. On the other hand, when parents need help from children in housework labor, they will coreside with lower-educated children, whose opportunity cost of housework is lower. By adopting a data set containing information on parents and their married adult children, we find that our two hypotheses are supported among families from rural China. The probability of coresidence is positively associated with relative education of the children when parents can provide help but negatively associated with education when parents need help.

No abstract

As an extension of traditional trade, digital trade is a new type of trade in the era of the digital economy. In this paper, we first analyze the digital trade-related strategies of eight leading economies through word clouds and dissect China's digital trade-related policies using the word frequency method by sorting through the digital trade-related policy documents of 26 economies and Chinese provinces. We then evaluate the status quo of digital trade development in 111 countries and Chinese provinces by building a digital trade index system to determine the development environment and market potential. The resultsshow that all countries attach great importance to digital technology, data and government guidance in the development of digital trade. The results also reveal that "development," "service" and "construction" are the three most frequently used words in various Chinese documents. The overall level of China's digital trade is at the global vanguard, but is characterized by uneven regional development. In the era of digital trade, traditional international trade theory is also in urgent need of breakthroughs and innovation.Intelligence, Don Tapscott, the top-ranked digital thinker according to Thinkers50, proposes 12 characteristics of the new economy: knowledge, digitization, virtualization, molecularization, integration or internet working, disintermediation, convergence, innovation, immediacy, globalization and discordance. These features of the digital economy and the digital technologies that underlie its development, such as big data and cloud computing, are transforming business and international trade and have greatly contributed to the arrival and development of digital trade, highly improving transaction efficiency and significantly reducing trade costs. Traditional trade, characterized by its large scale and high value, is basically conducted offline from inquiry, bargaining and contracting to final delivery. In contrast, digital trade, particularly cross-border e-commerce, a fragmented trading mode with multibatch features, has subverted the previous trade model; it is reshaping the entire trading system and will have a new and significant impact on countries' economic development. As a key link of the digital economy, digital trade, such as e-commerce, has already shown vigorous prospects and booming development. According to the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China (MOFCOM), global online retail sales reached US$2.304tn in 2017, with a growth rate of 24.8 percent compared to 2016, accounting for 10.2 percent of total global retail sales (MOFCOM, 2018a). The global B2B e-commerce transaction volume in 2017 reached US$7.7tn, more than double the transaction volume of online retail sales (Amasty, 2018). China's digital trade has also demonstrated a rapid growth trend. The overall e-commerce transaction volume increased from RMB6.09tn in 2011 to RMB29.16tn in 2017, with an average annual growth rate of 29.8 percent (MOFCOM, 2018a), in contrast to the annual average of less t...

No abstract