Fuxiu Jiang from the Renmin University and Kenneth Kim from the Tongji University have prepared a paper that drills down into the mechanisms that make corporate governance (CG) different in China. They believe the arc of China’s CG progress will bend neither towards the Anglo-U.S. model nor to Japan-German practices. As the ‘China-Model’ is still […]

Kari Heimonen and Risto Rönkkö from the University of Jyväskylä and the Bank of Finland have taken a fresh look at the ever-topical notion that the Rmb is increasingly being woven more into the global currency system Since China got off its narrow U.S. dollar peg in 2005 there’s been a strong case to be […]

The young men (and they’re all young men BTW) in t-shirts with tats who promote cryptocurrency at the University of YouTube regularly cite the coming of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a key reason to love the crypto; but so far and to date, CBDCs have failed to arrive. Nobody has made more of […]

The IMF’s regular publication ‘Finance and Development’ is free and an always good read. The September edition though is especially interesting so I’ve decided to highlight the best articles from it today. You can get a copy via the following link Finance and Development – September 2024. The magazine focuses on a key issue for […]

Henry L. Friedman of the University of California’s Anderson School of Management (et al.) found a unique opportunity to test whether or not management guidance helped investors to more orderly or ‘better’ markets. In June 2020 China’s regulators dropped the requirement for companies on their GEM board to provide mandatory earnings guidance. Following the rule […]

The U.S. decided in 2017 to clip China’s wings as an export manufacturing powerhouse. Since then China’s trade balance has gotten a lot bigger. In June it reached a new record. So what’s going on? Trang Hoang and Gordon Lewis, researchers at the FED, have twigged part of the answer which they discuss in a […]

Koichi Yoshino from the Tezukayama University (Nara) together with others from the Bank of Japan address the China-growth question in the context of the Asian Fantastic-4 (F4, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) who’ve already blazed the trail. They conclude, if China can follow the same path the results should be equally impressive. However.. China differs […]

The paper highlighted this week starts with an important point. If China doesn’t continue to grow at a high rate that’ll suck for China AND the rest of the world. We’re not that far away, so most will remember, from the period after the Global Financial Crisis when China’s bold stimulus produced the largest component […]

Formally known as the ‘2024 Article IV Consultation’ this annual exercise often reveals more about what’s on China’s planners minds than what the IMF ‘outsiders’ wish for them. The work was completed in July but the full report was only released on August 2nd and you’ll find it (137-pages) in full here. Below I’ve extracted […]

There’s an important caveat that qualifies the work highlighted today from Yufei Zhang at the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Kyoto in Japan. Viz.: “..our results can only be understood under the Chinese special institutional background, where the most important economic resources are controlled by public sectors (including governments, SOEs and state-owned […]

[Another contribution to the ‘why China never made it to an industrial revolution whilst the West did’ discussion.] Ruanzhuo Zhai from the Renmin University and Xiaoyang Luan from the HKU Business School have identified a period in China’s comparatively recent history, from the 10th to the 14th century, when a mercantilistic school of Confucianism flourished. […]

I’m flagging the ‘paper’ this week despite it being poorly written, un-reviewed, lacking rigor and by somebody who’s claimed affiliation (London School of Economics) I have a question mark over. Having said all that, Neha Baid in the monograph linked to below, makes such a startling, counterintuitive point about the state of relations between the […]

[At a banquet in China a while ago I was (sadly, by dint of age) placed next to the most senior manager of the company visited. This meant all eyes would be on me when it came to the toasts, of which there were likely to be many, but I don’t drink. In my best […]

If you wanted to study the effect of the introduction of automated manufacture on societal well being and happiness China would be a good place to start. No other major economy has been as enthusiastic in bringing in robots to help out as the charts below show. Shangkun Xie and Siyuan Fan of the Nankai […]

Researchers at the IMF, Diego A. Cerdeiro ; Parisa Kamali ; Siddharth Kothari and Dirk V Muir in a ‘Working Paper’ for the organization take a look at de-globalization (the euphemism used throughout is ‘de-risking’) and try to calculate what the cost would be if present trends and proposals were more vigorously progressed. In a […]

On reading the paper highlighted this week from Gerald Wu, Grace Lordan and Nikita from the London School of Economics and Political Science I was struck by some obvious shortcomings. The sample size is limited, the focus is on a small demographic, the structure of the experiment didn’t convince me it was rigorous and as […]

I especially enjoy it when I find a piece that upends an established view. In this case both my own and the majority of those likely to be reading this. We all operate on bias, presupposition, prejudice and received wisdom and it’d be tiresome to spend every day in conflict examining one’s intellectual operating architecture. […]

Yurou Liu, of the Southwest Jiaotong University and Huaxia Chen of the Renmin University wondered if the degree of retail investor attention directed toward a company had a proportional effect on that company’s tendency to manipulate earnings? This question is particularly pertinent in China where so much of the turnover is due to retail investors […]