If the world’s big sportswear brands could invent a country with just the right mix of ingredients to fuel their businesses for years to come, it would look a lot like present-day China.
China’s economy firmly hit its growth target last year, but this is China, where figures are sometimes doubted and where economists look for signs of strain underneath the numbers.
The rise in diabetes in China could bankrupt the country’
Smaller cities on the cusp of China’s transformation toward consumer-driven growth struggle to overcome ill effects of previous economic model.
The government's 12th Five-Year Plan concludes this year, and work on drafting the 13th will begin soon.
Which way will China turn? In its work report to legislators at the National People's Congress meeting in March, the government...
Meat invariably means pig in China, with pork accounting for 65% of the meat consumed in the country.
And after...
Based on The Economist's calculations, China outpaced Japan as the world’s second-biggest consumer economy last year.
China’s embrace of conspicuous consumption has manifested itself at the dinner table. One item, more than any other, has possessed the power to confer face and status upon the host: shark fin soup.
This paper proposes a possible framework for identifying excessive investment. Based on this method, it finds evidence that some types of investment are becoming excessive in China, particularly in inland provinces. In these regions, private...
Were the Chinese cement industry a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world.
The new Communist leaders must reduce China’s reliance on exports to sustain expansion as the country faces a wealth gap that runs a risk of fomenting social unrest.
As China tries to shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by consumption, it hopes to double its consumer base.
Each year around this time, the Hurun Report, a Shanghai-based luxury publishing and events group, releases its compiled list of China’s wealthiest people. The report not only satisfies the prurient...
Gauges the key determinants of China's private consumption in relation to GDP using data on the Chinese economy and evidence from other countries' experiences. The results suggest there is nothing "special" about consumption in China. Rather, the...
Consumption in China is unusually low and has continued to decline as a share of GDP over the past decade. A key policy question is how to reverse this trend, and rebalance growth away from reliance on exports and investment and toward...
From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to ¼ of disposable income. The authors use household-level data to explain the postponing of consumption despite rapid income growth. Saving rates...
This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates...
The Chinese government has recently focused on the need to increase consumption to rebalance the economy. A widely held view is that despite China's remarkably high growth, the share of consumption in total expenditure has been low and declining...
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...
