A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Evidence of Precautionary Savings in China
Hui He, Feng Huang, Zheng Liu, Dongming Zhu, Sep 05, 2018China’s household savings rate has been persistently high since the early 1980s despite rapid economic growth and contrary to the predictions of the standard consumption theory. Since China has undergone large structural changes in its transition to a market economy, precautionary savings seem to be a plausible contributing factor to the high savings rate. We use China’s large-scale reform of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify exogenous changes in income uncertainty. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE households’ wealth accumulation from 1995 to 2002.
How Do Family Planning Policies Reshape the Life of the Chinese Elderly?
Yi Chen, Hanming Fang, Sep 12, 2018In our recent work (Chen and Fang, 2018), we evaluate the long-term consequences of China’s family planning policies on the quality of life of the Chinese elderly. We identify the causal impact by exploiting the provincial heterogeneity in implementing the “Later, Longer, Fewer” policies in the early 1970s. We estimate the causal effect on a set of outcomes, including support from children, consumption, and physical and mental health. We find that family planning has either no effect or a slightly positive effect on elderly parents’ physical health status; however, parents who are more exposed to family planning policies report significantly worse mental health.
China Caught in the “Middle-Income Trap”?
Linda Glawe, Helmut Wagner, Nov 22, 2017Since 2010–2011, China’s economy has slowed considerably, raising concerns that the country could fall into the so-called “middle-income trap” (MIT). Obviously, an MIT in China would have serious negative consequences not only for the Chinese population but also for the world economy as a whole. We examine whether China is or will be in an MIT by focusing on the empirical MIT definitions and the MIT triggering factors identified in the literature. We show that dependent on the choice of MIT definition, different MIT statements can be derived. Our triggering factor analysis reveals that while China performs quite well regarding its export structure, it must improve human capital accumulation and total factor productivity to avoid falling into an MIT.
Peak China Housing?
Kenneth Rogoff, Yuanchen Yang, Sep 16, 2020China’s real estate market has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the COVID-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and inevitable. Based on input-output analysis and benchmarking against other economies, we estimate the size of China’s real estate–related activities to be 29% of the economy and conclude that the sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggregate growth shock.
Healthy Life Expectancy in China
Han Li, Katja Hanewald, Shang Wu, Dec 20, 2017We predict and analyze provincial-level healthy life expectancy for 31 provinces of China in 2015. Using data from a wide range of countries, we construct a predictive regression model based on socioeconomic variables such as GDP per capita, health and education expenditures, and the number of hospital beds. We find substantial regional health disparities, with healthy life expectancy varying by up to 10 years between different provinces for both men and women.
