I have been arguing for several years that once China begins the adjustment process, which I expect to characterize the ten-year period of the current administration, growth rates must slow significantly. My expectation for long-term growth is that it shouldn’t average much above 3-4% annually. This is what it will take for household consumption to rise to roughly 50% of …
Read More…Category: Consumption and production
Three cheers for the new data?
The big news in the past two weeks has been the slew of economic data suggesting that China has firmly turned the corner on its economic closedown. Growth is up, investment is up, and inflation is down. Here, for example, is the New York Times, a newspaper whose website is no longer available in China without a VPN: …
Read More…Has the Great Rebalancing already started?
The following was written a month ago for my newsletter but because of the virus problem I had on my site I wasn’t able to post it until today. China’s official GDP growth rate has fallen sharply – on Friday Beijing announced that GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012 was a lower-than-expected 7.6% …
Read More…Debating growth in China
Perceptions have certainly changed a lot in the last few months. As recently as three years ago there were so few analysts who were skeptical about the sustainability of Chinese growth that we rarely disagreed among ourselves. Now, however, the group of skeptics has become large enough that there are serious disagreements among us as …
Read More…How to become virtuous and save more
For this week’s blog entry I want to go a little abstract in order to suggest how different countries that participate in the global imbalances are going to adjust. The debate over the root causes of global imbalances is as fierce and as confused as ever. The confusion isn’t helped by the vast army of …
Read More…Rebalancing through wage increases
Is China currently rebalancing? The currency has been appreciating, the PBoC has hiked interest rates four times, and wages have been surging. Because of all of this I am often asked if China has finally begun the long-waited rebalancing process and whether we have yet seen an improvement in the underlying economy caused by a …
Read More…What happens if Chinese growth slows?
Last week I suggested that slowly the consensus is shifting towards a recognition that Chinese growth may slow sharply in the next few years. When I discuss this prospect with analysts and investors, however, they almost always worry about two things. First, since China represents the largest component of global growth, it seems reasonable to …
Read More…The politics of Chinese adjustment
I am often asked, especially by my Peking University students, to list what I think is the sequence of steps China will take to address its economic imbalances. Remember that rebalancing, in the Chinese context, has a very specific definition. It means raising the consumption share of GDP. This is just a way of saying …
Read More…Have we underestimated Chinese consumption?
On August 8 Credit Suisse published a study they had commissioned by Professor Wang Xiaolu of the China Reform Foundation. A lot of readers have asked on- and offline me to discuss this study in light of the entry I posted two weeks ago about Chinese consumption – and especially to explain whether this study …
Read More…Chinese consumption and the Japanese “sorpasso”
There has been a lot of excited press commentary recently about China’s overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest economy. China’s GDP should be larger than Japan’s for the first time sometime this year, which in a similar context in 1987 the Italians called “il sorpasso”. For all the excited search for the deeper meaning …
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