Financial reforms and regional investment conflicts in China: A game-theoretic analysis

In the transition from a command to a market economy, macroeconomic stabilization poses a grave problem facing the reform governments. A distinct feature of China's economic fluctuations in the post-1979 period has been its "soft-constraint competition". A two-region game theoretical model is developed in this paper. We find that monetary decentralization in the earlier stage of economic liberalization takes the inflation and fiscal deficits out of the control of the central monetary authorities. The prospective financial reforms will subject local governments' investment drives to the indirect regulations of monetary policy; but by strengthening monetary restraints, will result in massive borrowing from the domestic, or perhaps more likely, the international financial market to finance government deficits, and hence a large build-up in the stock of debts.