More than half of my money invested in China is in the stocks of either State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) or quasi-SOEs. Their earnings are more reliable, the managers are more transparent, the operations tend to be more stable and they’re mostly better financed than private sector peers. Observable facts I’d strongly argue, not just my […]
U.S.-China trade in 2022, at U$730bn, was a new all-time record. Megan Hogan and Gary Clyde Hufbauer, both at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, look at changes in the pattern of trade between China and the U.S. since 2019 and find little changed over the period. Aggregate tariffs rose from 3.1% to 19.3%, China […]
There’s no doubt, and there’s ample academic literature to support the notion, that a regular dialogue with investee companies is a good thing for analysts and managers. Analysts make better forecasts and managers make smarter investment decisions as a result. Through COVID site visits were difficult and we had to rely on conference calls to […]
I have a couple of issues with the paper highlighted today. Viola Rothschild at the Duke University, Department of Political Science and her collaborator Hong Shen Zhu at the University of Pennsylvania, Center for Study of Contemporary China lead off by describing China as an ‘autocracy‘, which it isn’t, exactly. Second, they go on to […]
[The title of this note is a reference to a speech* given by Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, over six thousand times before his death in 1925. The speech encouraged Philadelphians not to dream of distant riches but find them, via observation and enterprise, in their own backyard. If you substitute ‘Hong Kong’ for […]
The New York Fed have a blog ‘Liberty Street Economics’ and in a recent post from advisors Hunter L. Clark and Matthew Higgins they look at the reality of China achieving per-capita GDP consistent with a mid-level developed economy, such as Greece. This is a policy goal and a target of 2035 has been set. […]
If you have an interest in cryptocurrencies the work highlighted today from Robin Hui Huang and Sunny Xiyuan Li in a Research Paper for the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law will be of interest. If you care about the development of China’s financial system, its central bank digital currency (CBDC, hereafter e-CNY) […]
In the latest Asia and Pacific Regional Economic Outlook the IMF have devoted around a third of the publication to a review of China. The reason, I think, is twofold: First, as they point out, the region will contribute two thirds of global growth in 2024 with China accounting for the lion’s share. Prospects for […]
Every so often I read something and go ‘Wow!’ Reviewing the paper highlighted this week was one of those moments. Eping Liu and Haoyuan Qin, both from the Business Schools of the Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have done extraordinary work, they claim is the first of its kind, on how corporate […]
Raghuvir Kelkar at the Silk Road School of the Renmin University of China and Zhengxu Wang from the Department of Politics at the School of Public Administration, Zhejiang University take a look at the so-called ‘Washington Consensus (WC)’ and what’s replacing it. Pronouncing the WC dead, they move on to consider how a ‘Post Washington […]
Jeff Dawson, an international policy advisor in International Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group has written a useful piece in the Bank’s blog ‘Liberty Street Economics’ on this topic of concern to all of us at present. China needs to persuade its citizenry to spend more, and this […]
Professor Fumio Hayashi of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo makes a no-nonsense argument in the paper this week about why Japan has spun its wheels for the past 30+ years. This is just “..what one would expect for any country experiencing a population aging as rapid as Japan’s.”. Moreover, his […]
With access to confidential data from the Mexican government for the period 2015~2021 researchers Hale Utar of the Grinnell College, Luis Bernardo Torres Ruiz of the Dallas Fed. and Alfonso Cebreros Zurita of the Bank of Mexico address the question ‘has Mexico been a beneficiary of the U.S.-China trade war begun in 2018/19?’. The short […]
Previous studies on short selling have focused on how investors use information to drive trades. The work highlighted today, from Lixin (Nancy) Su (et al.) of the Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Accounting and Finance, looks instead at the mechanisms that drives that information acquisition. The team looked at events in the U.S. and China […]
Just because the number of college graduates employed by the state has, necessarily, fallen in recent years this isn’t, necessarily, what many would have preferred. In a follow up to the paper highlighted last week about where China’s happiest workers are found the paper this week, from Hongbin Li (et al.) of Stanford University, looks […]
Studies elsewhere in the world have been inconclusive on this question. Possibly because working for the government means different things in different locales. Li He (et al.) decided to take a closer look at China. As they point out only the tobacco and electricity distribution industries are now entirely state run so private/public comparison in […]
By measuring the number of Confucian temples and academies within a 100-kilometer radius of a hedge fund’s location the authors of the paper highlighted today believe they’ve been able to isolate a beneficial ‘Confucian influence’ on investment performance. Specifically it’s the principle of ‘Doctrine of the Mean’ i.e. progress of a middle way in all […]
The value of stock-analysts has often been questioned (not much by themselves of course!). Some work has found they have a beneficial effect as guardians of corporate governance, but other literature notes they can collude with companies and increase market risk by trend following and over-hyping fundamentally shabby propositions. Recognizing the absence of value in […]
Corporate Board gender diversity is a hot topic globally. There seems no reliable consensus though as to what causes the imbalance in the first case. Some studies have noted that golfers and smokers, activities that less women than men seem drawn to, get promoted by bosses who they share time with in these activities. Could […]
Dan Ciuriak, of Ciuriak Consulting and a three-decade veteran of the Canadian civil service, takes apart the notion of BRICS (+ friends) emerging as a alternate to the Global North in the paper highlighted today. First, he unpacks the convergence myth. He notes that in the 1980s ‘developed’ countries were about 25% of the world’s […]