The Extremes of China Media

It seems to be the consensus among longtime China watchers that the Chinese media has become more radicalized over the last five years, with both online and traditional channels now feeding the public conflicting stories of both reflexive scorn for the status quo or patriotic jingoism. But how radical are things getting? And what are the limits to how much further they can go, or will be allowed to go, on either side?

Foreign Direct Investment, Corruption and Democracy

How do factors such as corruption perception and the level of democracy influence foreign direct investment to developing economies? The authors of this paper suggest that less corrupt countries and less democratic countries receive more foreign direct investment. What could account for this pattern of investment? This paper is the first to show that perceptions of corruption are highly correlated with indices of economic freedom, but uncorrelated with indices of political freedom. Hence less corrupt countries which provide the right kind of economic environment for investors, such as personal property protection, the right to move capital in and out of the country, or the ability to trade openly in world markets receive more FDI flows. At the same time, while democratic countries ensure provision of political and civil rights for citizens, these are not an automatic guarantee of economic freedoms. In fact, the correlation between the democracy index and these indices of economic freedom is surprisingly low.

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