In late 2015, the Chinese government launched a multi-year plan to reduce capacity in the coal and steel industries. Around the same time, producer price inflation in China started to pick up strongly after being trapped in negative territory for 4½ years. What is behind this broad reflation—cuts in coal and steel capacity or a strengthening of aggregate demand...
This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates, and price developments by city tier in China.
China has been shifting the composition of its external assets from accumulation of foreign reserves toward private, nonofficial outflows. This article provides an overview of the allocation patterns of outward equity investment by Chinese institutional investors (IIs) across destination countries and sectors. In their foreign portfolios, Chinese IIs overweight sectors in which China has a comparative disadvantage (for instance, computer software), and they concentrate...
The sharp appreciation of the U.S. dollar between mid-2014 and mid-2015 raised concerns in the U.S. and its major trading partners. Zheng Liu, Mark Spiegel, and Andrew Tai from the San Francisco Fed evaluate the impact of dollar appreciation on economic conditions in the United States and its three major Asian trading partners: South Korea, Japan, and China.
Reverse mortgages are financial products that allow older homeowners to live in their property and receive income for as long as they live; repayment is made from the proceeds of the property sales upon the homeowners’ death. A recent pilot program in China by Happy Life Insurance found almost no takeup of such products. We investigate whether, if reverse...