A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
Facebook 
Twitter 
Instagram
WeChat 
Email Most Popular
The Rise of China as an International Lender
Zhengyang Jiang, Dec 16, 2025In the past decade, China has become the largest creditor to developing countries, surpassing the IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club countries. This column discusses how China's overseas lending interacts with US monetary policy – another key driver of the global financial cycle. It finds that Chinese and US policies jointly influence the level and the distribution of risk exposures in developing countries. As a result of China's expanding role in international lending, the architecture of global financial intermediation is also undergoing a fundamental transformation, carrying important implications for the stability and functioning of the international monetary system.
From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools
Eric A. Hanushek, Le Kang, Xueying Li, Lei Zhang, Jan 21, 2026Rural school quality is low and varies significantly across provinces. We estimate provincial variations in school quality from the labor market returns to years of schooling of interprovincial rural migrants educated in different home provinces but working in the same urban labor market. School quality is higher and provincial variation is lower for younger cohorts, indicating at least partial effectiveness of recent policies aimed at improving the quality of rural schools.
Paying to Pollute: How Carbon Offsets Actually Raised Emissions in China
Qiaoyi Chen, Nicholas Ryan, Daniel Xu, Oct 29, 2025How do we cut carbon emissions without slowing economic growth? One way is through offset markets: markets to buy reductions in emissions from parties all over the world. Offsets are meant to incentivize projects that cut emissions. Instead of reducing emissions themselves, firms or countries can pay others to do so on their behalf. This trade in abatement can potentially lower the costs of bringing emissions down.
Government reform and innovation performance in China
Min Zhang, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Nov 26, 2025This column exploits the staggered implementation of government agency reforms in China to examine the impact of institutions on innovation. It finds that the regions which pioneered these reforms have reaped the rewards of reduced bureaucratic friction and enhanced regulatory efficiency, manifesting in marked gains in innovation performance. The dividends of institutional reform are most pronounced in city-regions already endowed with robust innovation infrastructure and intellectual capital.
Place Prosperity vs People Prosperity: Migration and the Intergenerational Transmission of Knowledge
Carol H. Shiue, Wolfgang Keller, Apr 23, 2025The trajectory of an economy's development can often be better understood through the historical experiences of its populace. Long before the availability of comprehensive official data, Chinese family genealogies are a valuable resource for reconstructing economic evolution over time, as the following shows.
