Author: Nial Gooding

The first High Speed Rail (HSR) train ran in China in 2008 from Beijing to Tianjin on 113km of track. China’s HSR network today, at 18, 000km, is four times larger than Japan’s, 6x larger than France’s and 8x larger than Germany’s. It’s also, literally, infinitely larger than the U.S.’s which is, at present, non-existent. […]

Is there anything to add to volumes of work in recent years on China’s residential property market? To my surprise, reading the paper highlighted this week, I found there is. Researchers Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, writing in a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, compare recent developments in China […]

First, it joins the WTO. Then, it begins internationalizing it’s currency. Now, it creates an alternative to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with capital equal to two thirds of the ADB’s and half of that of the World Bank. Grassy-Knollists would see a pattern here. China is clearly engaged in a long-term bid to displace […]

An obvious point often has to be made before it becomes, well, obvious. In the paper highlighted this week (math heavy and as if ejected from Google translate; but indulge) Wen Shuyang from the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu takes an alternative look at China’s pollution problem. He takes the novel, and […]

The paper highlighted this week asks did price discovery in Shanghai improve after the Shanghai – Hong Kong stock connect introduction in November 2014? Songbin Sohn from Peking University and Na Jiang from Pennsylvania State University set about answering the question by analyzing stocks that trade in both markets, the so-called A-H shares. Because there […]

For many years the free movement of people was seen as a net good (which it is). Locals in Texas would rather do nothing than pick melons and the ‘Polish plumber’ in the U.K. was for a long time a role model of migrant can-do spirit, contributing to the local economy and their own lot […]

A little over a year ago China’s domestic stock markets were in a death-spiral free-fall; and then the government set about restoring calm. Part of a package of measures was a stock purchase program using the agents of the China Securities Finance Corporation and Central Huijin. Not long after the intervention, because so much of […]

What’s especially interesting about the paper highlighted today is when it was written, back in December 2014. Then, Lawrence J. Lau of the Institute of Global Economics and Finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, noted overcapacity in the Chinese economy and a savings rate not conducive to encouraging household consumption. Of note, in […]

The paper highlighted this week so neatly fed the tired trope that China’s infrastructure build has been mostly a bad idea it got widespread press coverage last month. Writing in The Oxford Review of Economic Policy Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lum, all from Oxford University concluded; ‘..unless China shifts to a […]

It’s a harsh fact of life that good looking people, of both sexes, have better lives than moosey peers. They earn more money, have more partners and in many surveys have the cheek to record higher overall happiness scores. Beauty then is not in fact just skin deep, it ripples through a personality too. Why […]

An article appeared in the September 3rd edition of the Economist Magazine [Australia’s Economy – Good on you] from which one line jumped out at me. ‘As China rebalanced and commodity prices tumbled,..’ it began. This was the first time I’d seen in print an acknowledgment that China’s economy is fully in rebalance mode. The […]

Another first from the German based Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Last week’s paper showed a conclusive link between mental health in the elderly and wealth, the first study of its kind to prove a clear association. This week’s paper, again from researchers working for an IZA report, show a link between white-collar […]

That there’s a relationship between health, happiness and relative wealth has been understood for a long time; but studies have struggled to isolate the dependent variable. Are healthy people capable of earning more money and therefore better off or are people who are better off less stressed and therefore less prone to illness? In the […]

Has income inequality increased or decreased in China in recent years? The chart provides the clear answer. It’s decreased. This is consistent with an intuitive theory [Kuznet’s Curve] that posits developing economies will experience increasing income inequality in the early stages of their development; but this will reverse in the later stages. So we’re all […]

In theory, firms facing a shortage of something are more likely to progress innovation than firms who are faced with an abundance of factors necessary for production. In practice this is hard to prove. Zhibo Tan, assistant Professor at the School of Economics at Fudan University and Xiabo Zhang, Professor of Economics at Peking University […]

The paper highlighted this week looks at an issue shaping political debate across the developed world. What effect has China (and by implication other developing nations) had on employment patterns in the West? Wolfgang Keller and Hâle Utar of the universities of Colorado and Bielefeld respectively studied employment patterns in the textiles and clothing industries […]