No assessment of China's growth is complete without considering the implications of having hundreds of millions of underemployed people in China's economy for the foreseeable future. The bottom line is that China needs to build on its recent efforts to boost rural education, health and nutrition, and early childhood development, and do so at a pace and intensity that recognizes these are potentially among the biggest problems the nation faces.
The announcement on May 17, 2013 that CPC’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) would start to conduct several rounds of inspections of provincial governments, may serve as a rare natural experiment to examine the equilibrium consequences of corruption on firms. Professors Haoyuan Ding of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Hanming Fang of the University of Pennsylvania, and Shu Lin and Kang Shi, both of The Chinese University of Hong Kong exploit event studies to show that the stock market overall reacted positively to the CCDI announcement, and they also show that there is interesting heterogeneity across firms in their reactions to the news. They argue that the CCDI announcement on May 17, 2013 has likely triggered an expectation of norms change of bureaucratic behavior.
Many people have attributed China’ s growth since 2001 to its accession to WTO and the resulting rapid export expansion. We provide quantitative evidence showing that internal economic reform, not export expansion, was the real driver of China’ s growth in the period after 2001. We also show that there is still large potential growth from further internal reform in China.
Corporate credit growth in China has been excessive. The debt problem should be addressed urgently with a comprehensive strategy, trading short-term economic pain for larger longer-term gain.
In our recent work (Couture et al., 2018), we combine an experiment that we implement across Chinese villages with a new collection of survey and administrative microdata to provide evidence on the potential of e-commerce integration to foster economic development in the countryside. We also explore the underlying channels and the distribution of the gains from e-commerce across households and villages.