Professor Xianxiang Xu’s Lecture (from Sun Yat-sen University) and the 2^ndSeminar of the Center for Economic Research was successfully held on Mar. 8^th, 2012. The Dean of the Center for Economic Research, Professor Shaoan Huang, the Deputy Dean, Professor Jian Wei, the Assistant Dean, Professor Fengrong Wang and student representatives attended the Seminar.

The topic of Professor Xianxiang Xu’s Lecture was “local officials lead the variation of industrial structure”. He mainly discussed how to identify the correlation between officials and the variation of industrial structure by creating analytical data of the model. The speaker of Waseda University, Masanori OHKUMA made a presentation of “The role of FDI in local financial development in post-reform China: Evidence from panel data”. He explores whether incoming foreign direct investment improves the distortions in credit allocation in China’s banking system. Controlling other factors, he finds that foreign direct investment exerts significant positive influences on local financial development–the availability of bank credit for the non-state-owned sectors and deposit collection–in recipient provinces. Further, the marginal effects of incoming foreign direct investment appear to be relatively large in more economically developed provinces. The empirical results suggest that it is important to spur competition among domestic banks at the local level by introducing foreign direct investment or through other means to improve the efficiency of capital allocation and, consequently, to facilitate the growth-led firms in China.