In this book, Yasheng Huang makes a provocative claim: the large absorption of foreign direct investment (FDI) by China is a sign of some substantial weaknesses in the Chinese economy. The primary benefits associated with China's FDI inflows are concerned with the privatization functions supplied by foreign firms, venture capital provisions to credit-constrained private entrepreneurs, and promotion of interregional capital mobility. Huang argues that one should ask why domestic firms cannot supply the same functions. China's partial reforms, while successful in increasing the scope of the market, have so far failed to address many allocative inefficiencies in the Chinese economy.
In Understanding China’s Economic Indicators, leading economist and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas M. Orlik introduces 35 of China's most significant economic statistics. Orlik explains why each indicator matters, how it is collected and computed, and its impact on equity, commodity, and currency markets. As China has emerged as a central player in the global economy, more and more investors are seeking profitable opportunities there. To choose the right investments, it's crucial to understand China's economic environment–and that means finding, interpreting, and utilizing China's growing base of economic indicators. Orlik helps investors make sense of data on everything from Chinese GDP growth to inflation, unemployment, bond yields, electricity production, and aircraft passenger numbers. He draws on the best information supplied by the Chinese government's statistical agency, ministries, and industry associations, as well as private sources. Each indicator is clearly described, along with a practical discussion of its implications for investors.
"This is a very important book."--Martin Wolf, Financial TimesA provocative look at how today's trade conflicts are caused by governments promoting the interests of elites at the expense of workers Longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award "Worth reading for [the authors'] insights into the history of trade and finance."--George Melloan, Wall Street Journal Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace--and what we can do about it.
Presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marked its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
This book is unique in covering all important topics of the Chinese economy in depth but written in a language understandable to the layman and yet challenging to the expert. Beginning with entrepreneurship that propels the dynamic economic changes in China today, the book is organized into four broad parts to discuss China's economic development, to analyze significant economic issues, to recommend economic policies and to comment on the timely economic issues in the American economy for comparison.Unlike a textbook, the discussion is original and thought-provoking. It is written by a most distinguished economist who has studied the Chinese economy for thirty years, after making breathtaking contributions to the fields of econometrics, applied economics and dynamic economics and serving as a major adviser to the government of Taiwan during its period of rapid development in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last thirty years, the author has served as a major adviser to the government of China on economic reform and important economic policies and cooperated with the Ministry of Education to introduce and promote the development of modern economics in China, including training hundreds of economists in China and placing many graduate students to pursue a doctoral degrees in economics in leading universities in the US and Canada. These graduates now plays pivotal roles in China and in the US in academics, business or government institutions. The essays, a culmination of the author's expertise in China over five decades, are being widely read in China. When the author became professor emeritus at Princeton, the University named the Econometric Research Program as the Gregory C Chow Econometric Research Program in his honor.
China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.
China is at a critical juncture in its economic transformation as it tries to rebalance what is generally seen as an exhausted growth model. A unifying theme across the reforms that will deliver this transformation is that it can no longer be achieved by raising the amount of physical investment and government direction of resource allocation. Instead China is building a new set of policy frameworks that will allow markets to function more effectively—not unfettered markets, but markets that work efficiently, in line with broad social and other policy goals, and in a sustainable way. Hence, China is now building a new soft infrastructure, that is, the institutional plumbing that underpins and guides the functioning of markets as the key organizing principle toward achieving sustained economic and social progress. Against this background, this volume provides policymakers, academics, and the public with valuable information about policies and institutions in China today. It also looks at the road ahead and key principles that can help China in navigating it. The book focuses on issues crucial in the country’s transformation, such as tax policy and administration, social security, state-owned enterprise reform, medium-term expenditure frameworks, the role of local government finances, capital account liberalization, and renminbi internationalization. As China moves toward a more price-based allocation of resources, strengthening monetary policy frameworks and financial sector regulation will be particularly important in channeling resources to the most productive sectors and minimizing the risks of financial sector stress. Also, upgrading statistical frameworks will be critical for macroeconomic policymaking and investors. Visit : http://www.elibrary.imf.org/page/modernizing-china