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The voluminous strategy research on the determinants of corporate scope is often premised on a well-established property rights regime, which contrasts with the weak property rights protection that still characterizes most countries today. We address this gap by applying property rights theory to theorize and empirically examine how the strengthening of the property rights regime affects corporate scope. Our analysis exploits the enactment of a property law that enhanced the formal protection of private properties in China as a quasi-experiment. We show that with a strengthened property rights regime, the horizontal relatedness among private firms' businesses increases, but their vertical relatedness decreases, compared with state-owned firms. Further, these effects are less prominent for politically connected firms that are afforded informal protection of property rights. Our findings shed new light on the property rights regime as a critical determinant of firms' horizontal and vertical scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper first provides information on the distribution of Chinese firms’ export destinations. It then examines the relationship between firms’ export market diversification and their productivity by using trade and production data from the Customs Trade Statistics and the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms in China from the years 2000 to 2006. We check the robustness of the results by controlling for potential endogeneity and estimating various specifications. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between the diversification of export markets and firm productivity. As firms begin to export, they face higher costs (and thus lower productivity) initially because they lack the knowledge and experience. Eventually, as diversification of the export market moves beyond a threshold level and investments cumulate, export market expansion results in lower long-run average costs and thus higher productivity owing to the learning curve and economies of scope, as well as economies of scale. This U-shaped relationship, however, is less pronounced for firms with higher share of intermediate products in total exports, for firms engaged in processing trade, and for firms exporting to Hong Kong. The results have significant implications for firm export dynamics and behavior, and can help target policies that will boost the performance of the firms. They are significant for policy makers who have emphasized the importance of export diversification for mitigating the impact of global shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of information technologies, distance education has become "another form of product differentiation in the output mix produced by the multi-product university or college" (Cohn & Cooper, 2004, p. 607). This article aims at analyzing the economies of scope of distance education (as an educational output) in Chinese research universities. The empirical results show that a) product-specific economies of scope do exist in distance education programs offered by Chinese research universities; b) there are economies of scale in distance education; and c) there are weak cost complementarities between distance education and research output, meaning that distance education and academic research can promote each other to reduce the costs in Chinese research universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiplicative effect in technological innovation is an important theoretical issue for us to explore. An examination of the working mechanism of the multiplicative effect in technological innovation can reveal that such an effect, which dovetails with the organization earners like those of Fordism, Toyota Production System and Wintelism, is caused by the coordination between such factors as the economies of scale, economies of scope, economies of connection, and economies of speed. Therefore, China has to spare no effort to make full play of the multiplicative effect in technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper looks at the technical efficiency of Chinese airports using multi-output stochastic input distance function analysis. This method provides a statistical test of scope economies to investigate the contribution of air cargo transport to airport efficiency. Our findings confirm the presence of scope economies in air passenger and air cargo transport among airports in China. We compare and contrast these results with results obtained from single-output stochastic production frontier analysis in which the effect of scope economies is not included. Our results indicate that the presence of scope economies significantly affects the estimation of technical efficiency, thus implying different efficiency rankings among airports in China. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the economies of scale and economies of scope for the Chinese research universities by employing the flexible fixed cost quadratic (FFCQ) function. The empirical results show that both economies of scale and economies of scope exist in the Chinese higher education system and support the commonly belief that universities as multi-product organizations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Employing the stochastic frontier approach and expansion path measures, this article estimates economies of scale and scope in China's banking sector during the period 1985 to 2002. The objective is to assess whether different ownership types and banking reforms affect economies of scale and scope. The traditional nonfrontier approach and the standard measures are also applied for comparison and completeness. The results indicate the presence of constant returns to scale and significant economies of scope for most joint stock banks throughout the period, and for state-owned banks in the later part of period, following a second set of bank reforms. There is evidence that use of the traditional nonfrontier model biases the measures of scale and scope economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]