Chee Keong Low, Associate Professor in Corporate Law at the CUHK Business School in Hong Kong and Tak Hay Low of the University College London have had another look at a case familiar to most Hong Kong investors. [For those not familiar here’s a quick synopsis. China Forestry Holdings listed in Hong Kong in 2009. […]

Thanks to the explanation in the paper highlighted today from Shen Wei and Liyang Hou, both of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I now understand why China’s version of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or the Digital Currency Electric Payment (DCEP), may be a damp-squib. They point out that Central Banks in general have […]

Zeyu Geng of Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange; University of Queensland takes us on a tour of where we are now in China in terms of the development of Fuel Cell Heavy Duty Vehicles* (FCHDVs). China is important because where it goes will be where the rest of the world will, most likely, follow. [* […]

With regard to COVID, there’s been a ‘Western’ response very different to China’s approach. In Western democracies there was initially scrambling to establish best practice and even now many voices are heard contributing to a public debate about correct next-steps. China, as we’re now aware, has adopted a more top-down model and these two approaches, […]

Not an academic paper highlighted this week but a feel-good article from the IMF in their Finance and Development series from researchers Benedict Clements, Sanjeev Gupta and Saida Khamidova (the full article is here Military Spending In the Post-Pandemic Era). The authors note military spending, globally, has been in a long term decline with health, […]

Hui Huang at the Department of International Development of King’s College London conducted interviews with platform-based food-delivery drivers in China to get a picture of their lives and working conditions during the pandemic; and that picture was/is not a pretty one. The two largest operators, Meituan Waimai and Ele.me (backed by Tencent and Alibaba respectively) […]

It’s been a mystery for many years, at least to the casual observer, how low ranking Chinese officials manage to get by on their official compensation. No mystery to those, especially businesses, that directly interact with them though. A well established system that implicitly requires “an affectionate reciprocation of our excellent services.” as one cadre […]

Are Chinese companies that choose a U.S-listing, as a group, ‘dodgy’? The collapse of Luckin Coffee and the kind of investigative journalism that turned into what Forbes called “The Most Important Film of 2018”, The China Hustle (watch it here if you haven’t seen it China Hustle), provides ample grist for a mill that concludes […]

[Normally I write a summary; but the author of the piece in focus this week, Mr. John Mueller of the Cato Institute, has prepared such a great one I’d only undermine the many important messages his piece contains if I tried. So, below is his summary in full.] “Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth […]

First, an aside. The Chinese government have all but declared war on the property market in the last few months as memories of the post-GFC runaway seem to be informing policy making. Not only have they moved to restrict developers’ access to funding they’ve also issued harsh rules for how property developers may progress their […]

Do capital controls work? There’s a long answer to that question with many subjective clauses but the short answer is, nobody really knows. There are so many moving parts to an economy and separating short, medium and long term effects not to mention the highly partisan nature of the question means juries remain out on […]

The scope of work highlighted today from Joanna Bialynicka of the Birula Cracow University of Economics, Poland concludes frustratingly in 2015. Trends identified, and the single most important, though I doubt have changed direction since and, if anything, are likely to have intensified. A summary of the main points: Over the period the volume of […]

I buy chocolate from a vendor in Istanbul. That vendor has to source ingredients like cocoa beans from suppliers outside Turkey in, say, Ghana. The Ghanaians in turn must buy fertilizer from, say, Korea and at every step a different currency is involved. The inefficiencies are obvious and why, in 2021, are we still trading […]

This happened in 2020: the U.S. economy contracted by 3.5% and China’s expanded by 2.3%; and Covid deaths, per million of population, were 300x higher in the U.S. than in China. There’s no debate to be had therefore about which country handled the problem better. Advantage, China. In the paper highlighted today from Yusuke Narita […]

What indeed? Scott R. Baker (et al.) from the Northwestern University has analyzed large stock market moves, their proximate causes and subsequent market performance based on media analysis. To do this he and his colleagues looked at 6,200 jumps in 16-markets from 1900 to 2020 (the U.S. from 1900, the U.K from 1930 and the […]

Jelena Große-Bley and Genia Kostka from the Free University of Berlin take a look at how (what must be) the fastest growing city in the fastest growing economy in the world is rolling with data usage, especially at the governmental level. Shenzhen is a good place to go looking for trends in how government are […]

The best place to start this summary is with part of the conclusion: “U.S. firms are collecting record royalty payments for their IP from China and generating gangbuster profits due to their access to Chinese labor, suppliers, and the country’s growing consumer market. American consumers benefit from US-China economic interdependence and so do some workers. […]

First, a relevant aside on Alibaba* (BABA). Below is the recommendation summary from Yahoo! Finance as of Friday, April 16th. Not exactly a wide dispersion of views (and check out that average target-price!). Sure, it’s a great company changing the face of commerce in the world’s largest consumer market, and all that. However, it’s also […]