The rise of China from a poor, stagnant country to a major economic power within a time span of only twenty-eight years is often described by analysts as one of the greatest economic success stories in modern times. From 1979 (when economic...
The People's Bank of China (PBC) has made great strides in modernizing its monetary policy frameworks, but their effectiveness will diminish as the sophistication of the economy increases. Empirical evidence supports maintaining a reference to...
Based on a survey that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, the authors examine the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in...
This paper uses the standard one-sector neoclassical growth model to investigate why China's consumption has been low and investment high. It finds that the low cost of capital has been quantitatively an important factor. Theory predicts that the...
China’s labor-intensive economic growth over the last two decades allowed the transfer of a vast amount of low-wage labor from both the rural sector and the declining state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. That allowed China to grow by “walking on...
A major challenge for China’s policy makers is to determine how best to provide the necessary energy to fuel China’s extraordinary economic growth. The traditional approach has been to rely on increasing the supply of conventional energy...
Every year, millions of China’s poorest and most vulnerable people are arrested on the streets of the nation’s cities merely because the way they look or speak identifies them clearly as “outsiders,” not native to the city in question, or because...
Is the post-Mao era truly a transition toward free-market capitalism, or is it yet another nominal “rightward” shift in the swinging pendulum of the Chinese Communist Party, to be offset in the future by more drastic elements of plunder by the...
