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.
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.
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.
I study the causal effects of South Korea’s baby bonus on fertility by exploiting temporal and spatial variation in pro-natalist cash transfers provided to families with newborn babies. Based on registry records spanning the universe of births from 2000 to 2015, I find that the baby bonus increased completed fertility: in the absence of the policy, the total fertility rate in 2015 would have been lower by 3%, which is equivalent to 450,000 fewer babies born...
We study the impact of recent tariffs on US prices at the border and at the store. Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.