China Dream

The authors of the paper summarized below admit their analysis could be better. It could have had a wider scope and it would have been better if it’d been conducted over a longer time period; but, as their subject didn’t exist until October 2019 I think we can forgive them. If their work has Swiss-cheese-like […]

As an in-part follow up to last weeks’ review of the IMF’s annual China report the work today, from the U.S. Federal Reserve last November, takes a closer look at how Chinese economic activity impacts the world*. [*The IMF estimated in their report a 1% change in China’s GDP implied between a 0.25%~0.4% global spillover, […]

The IMF raised its 2023 GDP growth forecast for China to +5.2%* on January 30th and, given we’re only in February, it seems likely there’ll be more favorable revisions to come. [*Some confusion. In the China Report, dated February 3rd and highlighted below, there’s a forecast of +4.2% for 2023 GDP, but in the World […]

Stephen Deane CFA and Oliver Fines CFA talked to practitioners, academics and users in the crypto space to put together the report which you can read in full via this link Cryptoassets: Beyond the Hype. They advise the two main engaged camps i.e. policy makers and investors, as follows. To the former, the advice is […]

[The paper highlighted today is so well written it’s been hard to summarize. If you’re involved with or have a desire to invest in China’s new-economy I’d urge the full read which you can perform via this link The Great Rectification] Roger Creemers from the Leiden Institute for Area Studies at the Leiden University of […]

The Solow Growth Model (Solow Model, a quick primer), named after Nobel prize winner Robert Solow explains how an economy can grow relative to inputs such as capital, technology and labor. As Tianyong Zhou of the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics points out however this model does a poor job at explaining China’s past […]

J.P. Morgan was asked in 1912 by a Congressional Subcommittee (the Pujo Committee) what the most important factor in determining creditworthiness was? His answer became famous: “The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me […]

Kristi Govella, Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa takes a closer look at how rising powers (read China throughout) are dealing with ‘global commons’ issues. By looking at how rising powers have dealt with the long established and widely accepted norms in place in the centuries […]

In a Peterson Institute for International Economics Policy Brief (an accessible 11-pager) Professor Robert Z. Lawrence of Harvard University addresses the issue of the precariousness of the WTO in the light of unilateral sanctions by members against one another in recent years. That the WTO isn’t functioning properly is a problem not helped by America’s […]

There’s an established body of research on how investor contact can affect company behavior. Most work concludes the interactions are beneficial in that the process shines more light on the corporate managers and more light is better than less. The work picked over today is therefore of interest as it demonstrates how, in certain circumstances, […]

From a somewhat unexpected source comes new work on the age-old question of why the East failed to industrialize and why the Industrial Revolution was a Euro-centric affair. Rafael Torres Gaviria, from the Department of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia believes the answer, in a nutshell, is Mongols. The mystery is more […]

To liberalize or not to liberalize, that is the question many developing markets wrestle with. If you open up your markets you could be opening up to chicanery, volatility and a noncompetitive increase in the cost of capital as a result. If you don’t, you could lose the benefits of better actors and the improved […]

Heng Wang and Ross P. Buckley of the University of New South Wales, in a paper for a forthcoming edition of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, bring us up to date on China’s progress with their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or as it’s mostly now referred to the e-CNY. If the subject is […]

Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan, both of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (a Washington based think tank), take a closer look at “The CHIPS and Science Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on August 9, 2022, [Which, in their words] represents the biggest US foray into industrial policy in 50 years.” […]

Unsurprisingly, for-profit providers of shared e-bike services claim they reduce carbon emissions; but is this true? Qiumeng Li (et al.) of the University of Cambridge notes in the paper highlighted today there’s (until now?) no real consensus on this among the scientific community. The problem is if they’re being used instead of a regular bike […]

Social science and economics researchers love ‘exogenous shocks’ or what the rest of us call ‘bolts from the blue’. These shocks allow them to look for patterns the slow creep of orderly progress often mask. Zhenshu Wu (et al.) from the Tilberg University of the Netherlands has used the shock of the COVID-19 stock market […]

Hanming Fang, at the University of Pennsylvania – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (et al.), isn’t claiming the paper highlighted today is revelatory. There’s no doubt people feel better and spend more when home prices rise than when they fall. What’s new in this work however is the data being compared and, […]

Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Yuanchen Yang of the IMF, writing in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.), supply a fresh and perhaps the most up to date look at China’s residential property market. The focus of the paper is not the widely reported-on Tier 1 […]