Since it is the Christmas holiday, and I am spending the week in southern Spain with my family, I have not been focusing too heavily on economic data and have instead been reading lots of different stuff, including Frederic Wakeman´s excellent The Fall of Imperial China, about the transition from the Qing, especially the late …
Read More…The Christmas season, upcoming exams, student job hunting, and lots of visitors have made this a tough time to keep track of things but, before I go on to discuss the reason for the title of this entry, I wanted to make a quick comment on the economic numbers that came out last week. As …
Read More…Last week China Daily had an interesting article on job prospects for university graduates on the mainland. In 2006, as a reaction to rising unemployment among college graduates – even with GDP growth buzzing at rates above 12% – the government launched a program to help students find jobs as university teachers. The program has …
Read More…A friend of mine sent me the following table. It comes from a paper presented at the September 2007 International Conference on the CCP’s 17th Congress by Daniel Xu and Ning Ding (“Distortion of Population Growth and Pressure on Employment”) and shows the number of people, in millions, entering the job market in China every …
Read More…As a finance guy whose area of interest is financial stability and the impact of short-term adjustments on the economy, I usually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen in the next few decades, but because of the significant and historically unprecedented demographic imbalances we are seeing in the world today, …
Read More…According to Friday’s China Daily (and a host of other newspapers around the world), a just published Gallup survey claims that most Americans think China will be the world’s largest economy within 20 years. We obviously need to take these opinions with a grain of salt since, according to the same survey, 40% of Americans …
Read More…I am often asked if the one-child policy is still in force here in China. It is a confusing topic and I know there are lots of exceptions, but China Daily recently released some interesting information about the most recent population census. In 1990 there were 3.92 people in each family in China, on average. …
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