On April 8, 2025, the 35th Camphor Economic Circle Seminar (Guangzhou-Macao) was successfully held at Faculty of Finance of City University of Macau. Jointly organized by the Camphor Economic Circle and the Faculty of Finance of the City University of Macao, the Seminar, with the theme of “High-Level External Liberalization and High-Quality Development”, attracted experts and scholars from China, Japan and other countries and regions, to start in-depth dialogues around such cutting-edge topics as RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnarship) and the construction of “One Belt and One Road”, the enhancement of the toughness of the industrial chain, the innovation of green finance, and the integration of the development of digitization and intelligence, etc.

The opening ceremony of the forum was hosted by Prof. Zhou Yonghong, Prof. Li Qiang and Dr. Xu Wenli from the Faculty of Finance of City University of Macau. Prof. Adrian Cheung, Dean of the Faculty of Finance of the City University of Macau, extended a warm welcome to the participants and emphasized the unique value of Macao as a Sino-Portuguese platform for the study of openness. Professor Liang Pinghan of the School of Government of Sun Yat-sen University emphasized that this conference, as the first outbound conference since the inception of the Camphor Economic Circle Seminar, marks a new stage of cross-border synergy in the construction of academic communities, which not only establishes a new platform for academic exchanges between Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, but also helps to build an intellectual support system for the development of a new dual-circle development pattern.

After three rounds of anonymous evaluation by the Academic Committee, nine quality papers with both theoretical depth and practical concern were selected from more than 100 submissions for on-site discussion:

Dr. He Zhihao from Renmin University of China presented his working paper on the impact of children's gender on parental labor supply. The empirical study found that gender differences in children significantly affect parental labor supply, including labor participation rate and labor hours, and that this impact may vary according to intergenerational care and competition in the marriage market, and explored the potential welfare loss.

Prof. Li Qiang of the City University of Macau introduced the existence of both “scarring effect” and “selection effect” on children's height due to mothers' cumulative exposure to starvation, with the latter being the dominating effect. This effect stems mainly from the height stunting effect of famine on the parental generation, rather than from gender preference or mate selection. The possibility that major setbacks in the development process may be transformed into intergenerational resilience through the mechanism of natural selection is instructive for developing countries to understand the long-term effects of nutrition intervention policies.

Prof. Rong Zhao of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law said that the opening of capital accounts has significantly improved the quantity and quality of enterprise patents and the efficiency of the allocation of industry innovation, and has helped enterprises with zero patents to realize breakthroughs. The effect is more prominent in economies with perfect systems and sound rule of law, and industries with obvious comparative advantages and high innovation potentials benefit more, which confirms the decisive role of system quality on the effect of liberalization policy.

Wang Zehui, a doctoral student at Beijing Normal University, reported “Estimating the Policy Burdens of SOEs: Evidence from the Poverty Alleviation Campaign in China”, which quantitatively analyzed the policy burdens of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the fight against poverty . Based on the data of listed companies in China, the study quantitatively analyzes the policy burdens of SOEs in poverty alleviation campaign and reveals their mechanisms and transmission paths, providing new evidence for understanding the government-enterprise relationship in the transformed economy.

Wei Xiaopeng, a doctoral student at Hitotsubashi University in Japan, analyzed an issue that has been neglected: how export policies affect the import behavior of enterprises. Based on Pol Antras's global sourcing model, which takes into account export policies and different ways of exporting, he utilizes tax survey databases and customs data to find that export restriction policies affect imports through financial costs while affecting exports, and that this negative effect can be mitigated by changing the way of exporting.

Dr. Ye Mengqian, a doctoral student from Xiamen University's School of Economics, presented her paper “Entrepreneurial Innovation in the ‘Artificial Intelligence +’ Mode: Technology Distance, Artificial Intelligence Inputs, and Industrial Economic Effects”. The paper focuses on the innovation mode of AI integration with the real economy, and analyzes the patents and previous company annual reports through the big language model, which is the first time to construct the measurement method of this mode, and reveals its quantitative growth and economic impact factors. She shared the dynamic evolution of enterprise innovation in the “Artificial Intelligence +” model, and explored the roles of technological distance, AI inputs, and spillovers in the industrial chain.

Dr. Yao Qinyang, a PhD student a from Chongqing University, introduced the land reform that China implemented in the 1940s and 1950s, which reshaped the distribution of rural land and significantly reduced the wealth gap in rural areas. This study obtained land distribution data by combing through local chronicles and combined it with census data for comprehensive analysis. The results of the study show that this land revolution led to a significant decrease in the age at first marriage for rural men. Specifically, among the group of men who were not married before the reform was implemented, those affected by the land reform policy had a lower initial marriage age by 0.13 to 0.17 years.

A study by Assistant Professor Chim Chiu-kwan of Hong Kong Baptist University found that the loss of agricultural labor induced by the household registration reform has led to a shift in the cropping structure towards less labor-intensive crops and a slight increase in non-labor inputs. Labor shrinkage and income growth are the core transmission mechanisms, revealing that planting adjustments are a key adaptation strategy for coping with labor shortages, and providing a new perspective for agricultural policies in transition economies.

Assistant Professor Zhao Yi of Henan University reported online that, based on the natural experiment of the policy structure of the Mainland-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the external financial uncertainty is transmitted through the abnormal trading of foreign investors, which significantly aggravates the heterogeneous fluctuation of the stock prices of the underlying stocks of the Mainland Stock Connect. The impact also inhibits the disclosure of listed companies' performance forecasts, magnifies information asymmetry, and has a greater impact on highly internationalized and coastal enterprises.

The conference pioneered the use of “professor evaluation + interdisciplinary dialogue” mechanism, each paper has different research areas of experts to comment on so that the wisdom of the collision can be used to stimulate innovative thinking. The team of PhD students from the Faculty of Finance of the City University of Macau participated in the whole conference organization, showing the enthusiasm of young students to devote themselves to academia.

The Faculty of Finance of City University of Macau would like to express its gratitude for the trust and cooperation of the Camphor Economic Circle, and would like to pay sincere tribute to all the scholars for their insightful opinions. The success of this conference would not have been possible without the professional evaluation of the Organizing Committee, the in-depth sharing of the presenters, and the meticulous preparation by the team of teachers and students. We are looking forward to continue to explore the new paradigm of open development with colleagues in the academic field by using academics as a bridge.