Author: Nial Gooding

Writing in the Journal of Foreign Affairs Weijian Shan, Chairman and CEO of HK based PE firm PAG and author of the recent book ‘Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America’ concludes America will be the loser from the trade war if it’s protracted. The main point he makes is the trade […]

Nobody really knows why China’s domestic A-shares trade at a premium, and have now for a very long time, to exactly the same shares listed in Hong Kong in H-share form. [A coffee, at your expense of course, and you can have my not very informed two-pennyworth at your leisure] Taking the approach, (sort of) […]

In the smallest of nutshells, here’s the picture (below) that sums up the 258-page report released by the ADB Wednesday last week, an update to work published earlier in the year. The elephant in the room is of course the trade dispute between America and China. Trade between the two countries is now conspicuously affected […]

Here’s the main problem with 5G (the chart below). The people who (currently, but that could change) are being asked to build the network may baulk at a potential repeat of what happened the last time they spent billions building the present network architecture. The paper highlighted today covers a lot of ground in a […]

China has been suspected [Because it’s true? Ed.] of fudging GDP data and called out, even by senior Chinese politicians, for doing so. However, a discrepancy between local and centrally tabulated GDP isn’t a problem unique to China. In America, according to the paper highlighted this week, local GDP calculations sum to around 1% higher […]

Should an Emerging Market economy (like China) allow it’s capital account to be liberalized? You’d think the answer would be obvious. However, like many other financial theory glib conclusions real-world experience suggests the answer is, in fact, complicated. Researchers are always looking for before-and-after situations to test theories and one was provided in China that […]

America’s “..capacity to uphold a favorable balance of power [In the Indo-Pacific] is increasingly uncertain.” could be the one-line summary of a new report published August 19th by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. It’s a long piece and alarmist in places; but the central argument i.e. that America’s military capability […]

The IMF (who work closely with the planners and whose opinion is therefore especially of note) produce an annual report on China’s economic progress and the latest edition came out August 9th. There’s a six chart summary and that’s linked to at the bottom of this note. The link will also lead to the 51-page […]

If VC or PE is your thing the work this week from Zhaojun Huang and Xuan Tian from Tsinghua University may be of interest. The real juice is the series of charts from around P.30 of the 58-pager and here’s just one that sums up the market neatly. Before you get to those charts though […]

[The paper highlighted this week is perhaps the least intelligible work I’ve reviewed, at least as far as the general reader is concerned. I won’t therefore express a view on the methodology and have to assume the conclusions are, at least in a general sense, valid.] In the paper highlighted this week Mario Arturo Ruiz […]

The U.S.-China Trade War is providing a laboratory for social scientists, economists and statisticians generating volumes of data that’ll be studied for decades (centuries?) to come. The paper highlighted today is just one of what will be thousands of works to come and because of its proximity to events is incomplete and flawed. However, it’s […]

[First; a ranty preamble. Well, it is my blog after all. Confucian, Confucianistic and Confuscianist are terms gaining greater currency in discussions about how things work in this part of the world. These terms are all euphemisms for the same thing i.e. ‘Chinese’ or ‘China-infuenced’. I object to this new usage as it’s at best […]

If you drop water into sulfuric acid it’d be wise to do so wearing gloves, goggles and a lab-coat. This advice is applicable whether you intend to do it in Belarus, Botswana or Belgium. My point? That’s science where the same thing happens every time no matter who performs the experiment or where. Then there’s […]

Chinese consumers, on a like for like basis, enjoy lower prices for same-same goods than in the U.S. They also have a broader selection of products and enjoy lower prices in bigger cities. So they’re better off right? The paper highlighted today from Robert C. Feenstra (et. al.) of the University of California, Davis and […]

Given expectations of good corporate behavior by the average investor in China may be lower than in more developed markets, does corporate fraud in China have much of an effect on investor sentiment? That was just one of the the questions Geng Niu (et. al.) from the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics set out […]

Yes, it is; and the paper highlighted today claims to be the first to take a detailed look at how robots are disrupting labor markets in the developing world. It must therefore also be the first paper to look at this issue in detail from a China perspective? In a Discussion-Paper-Series paper for the IZA […]

The recent Woodford collapse in the U.K. [Missed that? Latest here at Woodford Mess] conforms to a well established pattern. ‘Star’ fund manager (or large bank proprietary trader) from major institution strikes out on own; and falls flat on face. [The best one-liner I saw on the Woodford debacle came from an old colleague and […]

The paper highlighted this week was written in 2018 and provides some useful background to the current hullabaloo in Hong Kong. In an article for the Journal of Human Rights Asif Efrat and Marcello Tomasina, both from the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliyah in Tel Aviv, look at Australia and Canada and their pursuit of as […]

The gig economy has been touted as a place where the gender pay gap is less likely to reveal itself as it offers a more level playing field for people who contribute their services than more traditional places of work. So why do male UBER drivers earn around 7% more per hour worked than women […]