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 […]
Author: Nial Gooding
Categories
China; Finer?
Preamble My investment thesis for China hasn’t changed much in recent years; for new readers it goes like this: China, fundamentally, is fine. Its financial institutions are, fundamentally, fine. Its political system is, fundamentally, fine. Its citizenry is, for the most part, happy with its lot and businessmen of all hues are presented with many […]
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 […]
A copycat economy built on credit overly reliant on exports. Appalling corporate governance, unhelpful IR teams and hardly cheap stocks. Sound familiar? I’m not referring to China stocks today though. This was the received wisdom about Japanese stocks when I began my career in Asia in Japan in 1984; and we all know what happened […]
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 […]
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. […]