Riassunto analitico
The establishment of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, at the end of September 2013, represented the actualisation of the Chinese Government’s strategy aimed to reform the Country’s economic system. The Free Trade Zone’s main function is to act as a testing ground for the application of new innovative economic and administrative measures planned to guarantee the opening up to the outside world through the expansion of different business sectors. This paper will first analyse the Special Economic Zones’ evolutionary process (from mid-1980’s to the 21st century) which has led to the introduction of the first FTZ in Shanghai. Then, there will be a deep focus on the SHFTZ which will study both the motives that led to its foundation and other crucial aspects such as its geographical expansion, its organisational structure and the zone’s innovation system. In particular, to what concerns the “Negative List” administrative approach, there will be an analysis on the dissimilarities among the different versions of the list and on how the Chinese Government has been able to achieve a 50% reduction on the number of restrictive measures in the 2017 version. The paper will also examine the main results obtained by the Shanghai FTZ after 5 years since its launch. In particular, the research will not only assess the impact of the abovementioned reforms on the development of the Yangtze River Economic Cluster, foreign exchange, foreign direct investments and tax benefits but also how the SHFTZ has become a nationwide test model. Finally, this Master’s Thesis project will evaluate the practicability of applying, after the study of the existing economic literature, the multi-sided platform model within a Free Trade Zone.
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