Are China's official GDP growth number exaggerated? Hunter Clark, Jeff Dawson and Maxim Pinkovskiy from the New York Fed and Xavier Sala-i-Martin from Columbia University use satellite measurements of the intensity of China’s nighttime light emissions to proxy for GDP growth. Their estimate of Chinese GDP growth, since 2012, was never appreciably lower, and was in many years higher, than the GDP growth rate reported in the official statistics.
Using a longitudinal survey conducted by the authors in Shanghai since 2010, we empirically examine the differences between migrant schools and public schools. We find that migrant students in migrant schools performed substantially worse than their counterparts in public schools in 2010, but the difference decreased by half in 2012, thanks to financial subsidies to migrant schools. We also show that even fortunate migrant students who are able to enroll in public schools tend to go to poorer quality schools; however, there is no evidence on negative peer effects of migrant children in public schools.
Professors Hao Wang and Hao Zhou, both of Tsinghua University, Honglin Wang formerly of Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research (HKIMR) and Lisheng Wang of Chinese University of Hong Kong, argue that the shadow banking explosion in China may constitute a dual-track reform mechanism to liberalize the country's rigid interest rate policy.
The general lesson from this book is this: for a reform to be successful, it is important to use the universal principles, even if they are not enough by themselves, and it is equally important to find specific ways to implement the reform by fully incorporating the initial historical conditions as well as contemporary constraints. The perspective of reform provided by this book’s analysis on China can also be useful beyond China, precisely because it emphasizes that to make reform work, it is not enough to understand why reform works, but also how reform works.
A study shows that reducing PM2.5 in China can lead to significant health benefit. A reduction of PM2.5 by 10 μg/m3 (about 20% from the current level) could result in an annual saving of 75 billion Yuan (or over 2%) in healthcare expenditure. The benefit from improved air quality proposed by recent national policies in China could justify large investment in cleanup activities.