This article analyses the property tax reform in China in a computable general equilibrium model that recognizes the interaction between and among housing markets in different provinces and macroeconomic development. Using real data in 2010, we present the benchmark equilibrium for reference property and income tax rates. Then, we examine different property and income tax policies and make a comparison of their production, consumption, welfare and national income. We find that the implementation of property tax would decrease the house production at the expense of welfare in taxed area. The expansion of the taxed regions may increase the total social welfare and national income. Even though property tax policy may not be able to change the income distribution in China, increasing income tax rate could narrow the income disparity. Finally, this article shows the reliability of the conclusions when sensitivity analysis on optimal condition of equilibrium computation is performed under varied property tax policy.

We discuss metrics of globalization for individual economies as distance measures between fully integrated and trade restricted equilibria in economies initially operating under less than full integration with the global economy. Such metrics can be used to construct country globalization metrics reflecting the distance of economies from full global integration due to trade barriers, barriers to factor flows, barriers to international financial intermediation, solved technological diffusion and other economy-specific features yielding less than full integration into the global economy. Many distance metrics present themselves and none are wholly satisfactory since they each behave differently across various displacements from integration. Distance measures can, for instance, be small in goods space but large in price space. We present alternative measures constructed for eight OECD economies and comment in a concluding section on other measures used elsewhere in the literature such as trade/GDP ratios.

Many studies developed their framework for sustainability through indicator systems, but the interactions and relationships within these indicators have not been studied yet. In this article, based on indicator systems, we use a sample of 78 mining cities in China and employ structural equation modelling (SEM) method to explore the validity of sustainability framework. Our empirical results show that resources abundance positively affects urbanization level significantly but negatively affects cleaner production level and environmental protection level significantly; economic strength positively affects urbanization level significantly; cleaner production level has a significant effect on economic strength and non-mineral resources conversion efficiency. We also find that when economic strength is low, resources abundance might weaken the positive effect of economy on urbanization.