Research Insights

Professor Heiwai Tang, also Associate Director of HIEBS, together with his team, jointly published this report with Hong Kong Productivity Council. The report aims to analyse the current performance and the future potential of three advanced manufacturing industries, in which Hong Kong is often perceived to have comparative advantages – FoodTech, GreenTech and HealthTech.

Since Max Weber, Confucianism has been widely viewed as being in opposition to capitalist or modern growth in historical China, especially in comparison with the rise of Western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. In pre-19th century China, the absence of industrialization or capitalism is partially attributed to the conservative nature of Confucian culture, particularly the emphasis on the ‘adjustment’ to the world and the depreciation of pursuing wealth, among others. And perhaps more importantly, the clan as a tangible organization of Confucianism restricted interpersonal cooperation to the family or lineage scope. Such ‘kinship-based morality’, in contrast to the ‘generalised morality’ enforced by market institutions in the West, paved the way for China’s divergent developmental path from the West. In a recent study, Zhiwu Chen, Andrew Sinclair and Chicheng Ma find another channel through which Confucianism inhibits capitalism: competition in financial markets.

Dr Hongsong Zhang of HKU Business School and Dr Shengyu Li of University of New South Wales discussed in this VoxChina piece their investigation of the impact of external monitoring from the government on state-owned enterprise performance, using the variation in monitoring strength arising from a nationwide policy change and firms’ geographic location in China. We utilize a structural approach to estimate input prices and productivity separately at the firm level using commonly available production data. We show that enhanced external monitoring, as a key component of corporate governance, can substantially reduce managerial expropriation in procurement and shirking in production management. The results suggest that government monitoring can be an effective policy instrument to improve state-owned enterprise performance.

New research indicates that China’s stock market is leaving behind its casino reputation and is capable of fuelling growth

Past events can obviously have a profound effect on the future; but can these effects be measured and quantified? Two professors at the HKU Business School, Professor James Kung and Dr Chicheng Ma, and Dr Ting Chen of Hong Kong Baptist University, recently attempted to find out. They co-authored a paper on the impacts of China’s long-lived civil examination, the keju, on the modern-day society and economy of the country. They discovered that success in this ancient examination in particular locations led to a measurable effect on modern economic development in the same locations in the present day.

Dr Sangwoon Park’s study takes a scientific look at what makes friendships at work tick and how these friendships affect productivity in the workplace. His findings reveal that worker productivity declines when friends socialize at work, but that, surprisingly, people are also willing to “pay” almost 5% of their wages to work near a friend – suggesting that friends who work together get more out of their jobs than just money.