The paper in the spotlight this week is by Sandra Eickmeier and Markus Kühnlenz from the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt and is a reminder how economic concerns shift over time. Written in 2013 the paper addresses the issue of how much China contributes to inflation elsewhere in the world? Remember then commodity prices rode high […]
Author: Nial Gooding
The note highlighted this week doesn’t live up to the rather racy headline. It’s not about how the PLA is fanning, or preparing to fan, out around the world. It is however a useful think-piece about how, and in what circumstances, China might deploy it’s increasing military heft overseas. The paper (more an essay) comes […]
I have a problem with the work, that I’ll come back to, in the paper highlighted this week. In it Yuyan Tan, Yiping Huang and Wing Thye Woo, the first two researchers from the University of Peking and the latter from the University of California, try to quantify the effect on the economy of propping […]
Here’s an interesting map. It’s extracted from the paper I’m highlighting this week and shows China’s provinces and how anti-corruption campaigns have ebbed and flowed most frequently from 2000 to 2014 (darker = more campaigns). I’ll come back to it later. Guanjun Qu, Kevin Sylwester and Feng Wang from the Birmingham Southern College, Southern Illinois […]
Xiaoru Fei, Benjamin Shobert, and Joseph Wong have collaborated with the [U.S.] National Bureau of Asian Research to produce a summary of the state of life sciences’ development in China. Along the way they point out what China may lack in terms of sophistication in this field will be compensated, to some extent, by it’s […]
Summary Conclusion The world is always an uncertain place. China though presents more certainty about where it’s heading and how it wants to get there than any other major global economy. That investors are fearful of China presently, in the context of this surplus of certainty, seems perverse. Preamble The UK has just voted for […]
When you pick up a company’s Annual Report, especially in this part of the world, it quickly becomes clear if they’re trying to help you understand their business; or not. [The same is also true for IPO prospectuses, BTW.] However does clarity, or a lack of it, provide a reliable guide to future stock returns? […]
‘For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.’ (Matthew 25:29) Those words from the Bible would work as a two line summary of this document just published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). […]
The first line of this paper speaks volumes in terms of how any/all analysis of the housing market in China is flawed due to a shortage of long term data. Jing Victor Li from the Hang Seng Management College starts his work off as follows; ‘Before the establishment of China’s real estate market in 1998,..’ […]
The paper highlighted this week sets out to do one thing but in the process does something more useful for investors in the China property market. First, what it was supposed to do. Professors Ms. Rose Neng Lai and Mr. Robert A. Van Order, from the universities of Macau and George Washington respectively, wanted to […]
A peek under the sleazy hood of China’s law enforcement agency the Public Security Bureau (PSB) today. Mr. Daniel C. K. Chow from the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law has first hand experience of how foreign multinationals in China are shaken down by authorities that should be in the business of protecting them. […]
One of the sillier stories in recent weeks has been about the debt of the China Railway Corporation (CRC) being twice as large as Greece’s. The observation being irrelevant of course without some discussion of what’s on the other side of the balance sheet. In Greece’s case not a lot; we are and should be […]
Professor Gary King at Harvard, together with Assistant Professor’s Jennifer Pan from Stanford and Margaret E. Roberts from the University of California have done several remarkable things in the paper highlighted today. Not only have they produced the first in depth study of how the Chinese authorities attempt to manipulate views on social media they’ve […]
That tastes formed while young are sticky is not a new observation. I’ve lived away from the U.K. for over 30-years and you’ll still find Marmite somewhere in my kitchen. What this paper, by K. Sudhir and Ishani Tewari of the Yale School of Management produced in March this year, however adds to the understanding […]
The authors of this note, Hanming Fang, Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong and Li‐An Zhou from the universities of Pennsylvania, Peking and Princeton, serve up some real zingers for the uninformed about why China’s residential property market is not pre-bust Japan or the gaussian copula worshiping U.S. of the early naughties. Their observations are all the […]
The message in this paper, written only last month, is clear. The present system of local government finance is unsustainable. Fan Ziying and Wang Guanghua from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and the Director of Research of the Asian Development Bank Institute respectively trace the problem back to a major overhaul of the […]
China has a distinguished history, in statistical terms, of keeping tabs on its citizenry. Recently, increasingly sophisticated surveys are making number crunching easier for outsiders and the paper highlighted today is based on one such survey. The China Household Finance Survey covers 25 provinces, 65 cities, 80 counties, and 320 communities, including 8,438 households and […]
Whose opinion should we give more weight to? The Armchair General calling tactical moves from behind the lines or subaltern’s in the field engaged in the day to day struggle? It’s a moot point. From time to time views from both are likely to be useful. What’s probably not a good idea is to rely […]
I’ve said many times ‘China isn’t near half-way done’; but the paper I’m highlighting this week, from Justin Yifu Lin and Fan Zhang, both professors at Peking University, suggests I’m wrong. China may not even be near one-third done. They take a simple metric, China’s per capita GDP as a percentage of the same number […]
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Dare We Be Bullish About China?
In September 2014 I wrote about China heading toward a hard-landing Hard-Landing; and that sort of happened. I wrote again, in September 2015, about how we seemed to be then navigating a bumpy-bottom Bumpy-Bottom. I’m wondering now, is it time to start being more constructive? Summary Conclusion To be clear, when I talk about China […]