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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – World Bank China Economic Update. June 2022 – Between Shocks and Stimulus

This is how the World Bank is now summing up China’s prospects: 2021 was the bounce-back year, 2022 is about finally squishing COVID and 2023 will be about getting back on the front foot. The forecast recovery, it should also be noted, will occur without the inflationary blight the rest of the world is having […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Corruption and Innovation in China

China’s economic development in the last 40-years has progressed hand in hand with a high degree of corruption. This has led some to suggest that corruption may be a good thing. Perhaps it has a lubricating effect? Xiangyu Shi of the Yale University attempts to see if there’s a relationship between innovation, the lifeblood of […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Anatomy of the Global Saving Glut

[This is the first time I’ve seen the phrase ‘G3’ used to sum the economic world. It refers to the U.S., China and an aggregated (big country) Europe and is a descriptor whose utility will no doubt cause it to stick.] In the paper highlighted today Luis Bauluz (et al.) from the University of Bonn […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – A Review of China’s Financial Markets

[I’m fond of saying that to understand China properly you have to imagine it, in many regards, about 50-years behind the developed West. After reading this study I think, with regards to financial markets, that glib summary may be too kind.] Grace Xing Hao of the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University and Jiang […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – US-China: A New Cold War or An Overdue Negotiation

Professors Thomas M. Hout and Robert A. Rogowsky of the Middlesbury Institute of International Studies seem to be addressing U.S. policymakers in their Working-Paper highlighted today. It’s a good companion piece for work highlighted last week on the subject of whether or not China’s accession to the WTO has been a policy mistake by the […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Entry into the WTO-A Mistake for the United States?

A timely piece in the context of the discussion in the U.S. about rolling back the previous administration’s China tariffs. Jennifer Hillman, a senior fellow for trade and international political economy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, provides useful context on where China-U.S. trade relations […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Russia-Ukraine War and Systemic Risk: Who is Taking the Heat?

Unusually I’m not going to recommend a full read of the paper highlighted today from Anum Qureshi (et al.) of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. Partly because its a bit of a jumble and partly because the output from this kind of analysis, given how little data there is to plug […]

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Thoughts

A Letter To My Brother Last December On Crypto

My first (and last) contribution on cryptocurrencies was prompted by an inquiry from an unlikely source. My older brother, a recent retiree living in the U.K. wrote to me late in December last year with a simple question “Would I buy cryptocurrencies?” Below is my answer (with some minor edits) which I think covers everything […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Declining Business Dynamism

In an IMF Working Paper from February this year staffers Diego A. Cerdeiro and Ciane Ruane took a closer look at China’s flagging business dynamism. That this has occurred is in no doubt as the chart of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) from their study period, 2003~2018, shows. Here’s a summary of their detailed findings: The […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Economic Policy Uncertainty and IPO Underpricing: Evidence From China

I have a simple rule for IPOs, Hong Kong ones at least; leave well alone. Their popularity is, in part, based on data and historical experience from more ‘grown-up’ markets in which they’ve been shown to be subject to habitual under-pricing (they’re rarely, if ever, under-priced in HK for reasons I won’t go into here). […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Approach to Central Bank Digital Currency

If you know nothing about China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives the paper highlighted today may help you get up to speed. Heng Wang, of the University of New South Wales – Faculty of Law has drawn together an impressive check-list of work to-date, scholarly articles, broker research and etcetera which covers many of […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Religion and the Great Divergence of East and West: The Persistent Effects of Networks of Church and State in the Economic History of China and Europe

The paper highlighted today, from Hilton L. Root of the George Mason University is not an easy read, which makes it especially hard to summarize; but I’ll try… In short, it goes back to the earliest formation of Chinese and Western societies and suggests the Christian Church in the West and the Confucian top-down family-oriented […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance: Active Diversifiers and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies

In a Working Paper from the IMF researchers Serkan Arslanalp, Barry J. Eichengreen and Chima Simpson-Bell take a look at the U.S.-Dollar (U$) this century in terms of its use as a reserve currency. Lets start with one of the few things that’s crystal clear: The share of U$ being held by the world’s central […]

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Thoughts

NESCAR Watch – One Year On: Ample Scope For Further Significant Losses

A year ago I took a look at the components of an index of unprofitable new-economy companies Goldman Sachs put together in early 2021. [NESCAR Watch – Slow Pile Up: So Far] I described these stocks then as a window into a much bigger group, the New-Economy Speculative Complex And Related (NESCAR). Since then we […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Weather Variations, Climate Change, and Demand for in-theater Movie Recreations: Evidence from High-Frequency Movie-Viewing Data in China

I think the researchers (Chen Xi from the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, et al.) may be taking themselves a little too seriously with this paper that draws a line between climate change and future movie attendance in China (and by implication elsewhere). There’s a useful point though in terms of how weather […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – High-Speed Rail Network and Corporate Cash Holdings

I’ve flagged work before that highlights some of the dis-benefits for towns connected to China’s High Speed Rail (HSR) network and the paper today is in a similar vein. Yao Ge (et. al.) from the School of Management of the Xiamen University has taken a look at how an HSR connection affects firms near and […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Why Do Incumbents Fund Startups? A Study of the Antecedents of Corporate Venture Capital in China

Gary Dushnitsky and Lei Yu from the London Business School and the Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen had to crunch five separate databases together in order to extract an answer to the question ‘What drives corporate venture capital (CVC) decisions in China?’ This has never been done before and the resulting answer will be a […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Is Value Strategy Still Alive? Evidence from the Chinese A-Share Market

Investors in Chinese growth stocks have been keelhauled over the last 18-months, especially in those U.S. listed China shares they were persuaded were facsimiles of companies they were already familiar with (does this sound familiar? It’s the so-and-so of China, and etcetera). Let’s not dwell on that foolishness. On then to the next foolishness. Or […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Board Gender Diversity and Dividend Policy in Chinese Listed Firms

The paper highlighted today is a neat companion to last week’s on the subject of how high status women on company boards in China led to better corporate governance (CG) and less corporate shenanigans. This weeks offering, from Qurat Ul Ain of the Xi’an Jiaotong University (et al.), takes a look at another key indicator […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Beyond The Glass Ceiling: Informal Gender-Based Status Hierarchy and Corporate Misconduct

Analysis of the effectiveness of women on company boards remains a tangled mess. Some studies show they make no difference to financial outcomes whilst others point out the problems of ‘tokenism’ rendering analysis a flawed proposition from the get go. Researchers of the paper highlighted today wanted to narrow the focus of inquiry to the […]