Associate Professor Fu Qiang’s Paper Published in China Soft Science

Recently, the academic paper Analysis on the Formation Mechanism of Structural Slowdown under the Framework of Regulated Government Competition: From the Perspective of Overcapacity in Heavy Industry, independently completed by Fu Qiang, Associate Professor of the Department of Economics, School of Economics, Shandong University, was officially published in Issue 10, 2023 of China Soft Science, a top domestic journal in economics and management.

Based on regarding local governments as regional regulators, the paper constructs a framework of regulated government competition and systematically analyzes the formation mechanism of China’s structural slowdown from the perspective of overcapacity in heavy industry. The study finds that under the framework of regulated government competition, local governments (as regulatory entities) mainly achieve output growth by reducing the prices of intermediate goods. However, the monopoly in the intermediate goods sector and imperfect supervision lead to a new type of regulatory failure: local governments (growth-oriented regulators) collude tacitly with exclusive monopoly energy suppliers to set a lower electricity price for heavy industry and a higher electricity price for small, medium and micro industrial and commercial enterprises, resulting in the distortion of the equilibrium electricity price structure and the formation of a "heavy industry vortex". This "vortex" not only causes overcapacity in heavy industry, but also forms a system relatively independent of the overall economic operation, and exerts a significant crowding-out effect on overall economic growth in the long run, thus becoming an important cause of China’s structural slowdown under the "New Normal".

Fu Qiang is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics, Shandong University. His main research interests include anti-monopoly and high-quality development of China’s economy, national economics, and socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. He has published research papers as the independent author or first author in top and prestigious domestic journals such as Economic Research, China Industrial Economics, The Journal of World Economy, and China Soft Science. He has presided over more than ten national and provincial/ministerial-level projects including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC). He has also presided over a provincial-level curriculum ideological and political demonstration course of Shandong Province. As the second main completer, he participated in the construction of a course and a teaching achievement that won the national first-class course and the first prize of the 9th Provincial Teaching Achievement Award (Higher Education) of Shandong Province respectively. His paper independently published in Economic Research in 2017 won the first prize of the 33rd Shandong Provincial Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award in 2019.