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China Needs Tighter Macro-Prudential Regulations to Loosen Capital Controls
Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Andrea Ferrero, Alessandro Rebucci, Nov 29, 2017China is on a path to capital account liberalization. If the renminbi is to become an international reserve currency (e.g. Prasad, 2016), as it has started to and one day will be, China must have an open capital account. But once the capital account is open, the economy will be exposed to gyrations of the global financial cycle (Rey, 2014). This column argues that international credit supply shocks have powerful effects on real and financial variables of the receiving countries, but not all economies are affected similarly, and those that have lower loan-to-value ratios (LTVs) and limits on foreign currency borrowing (FXLs) are less vulnerable. As China lowers controls on capital flows (e.g., Benigno et al., 2016) it should consider tightening domestic macro-prudential policy regulations (e.g., Cesa-Bianchi and Rebucci (2017) to avoid excessive volatility.
The Price of Growing Like China: Higher Income Risks and Less Consumption Insurance
Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis, Yu Zheng, Jun 20, 2018Widening income inequality in China has prompted President Xi Jinping to shift focus and to emphasize the fostering of balanced, high-quality development. But how exactly did income inequality evolve over China’s growth process and what was its impact on consumption and welfare? Using a long panel of income and consumption data from thousands of rural and urban households, we document that the increasing income inequality in China mainly reflects increasing permanent income risk, against which it became harder and harder to insure consumption, over the period of rapid income growth from 1989 to 2009. In other words, as household income grew, so did income fluctuations. These income fluctuations had an increasingly direct impact on consumption. For rural households, the welfare cost from increasing income risk and increasing exposure of consumption to income risk can almost cancel out the welfare gain from accelerated income growth over those twenty years.
Combating Cross-Border Externalities
Shiyi Chen, Joshua Graff-Zivin, Huanhuan Wang, Jiaxin Xiong, Sep 21, 2022China implemented a pioneering policy in 2011, the Ecological Compensation Initiative (ECI), which establishes side payments between upstream and downstream provinces in the Xin’an River Basin.
The Impact of Rapid Aging and Pension Reform on Savings and the Labor Supply: the Case of China
Hui He, Lei Ning, Dongming Zhu, Jun 26, 2019Individuals can use savings and labor supply to self-insure against uncertainties over their life cycle, such as idiosyncratic income shocks and changes in longevity and pension benefits. Using China as a case study, we investigate, both empirically and quantitatively, the impact of rapid aging and pension reform on savings and the labor supply, and the roles...
The Impact of Rural-Urban Migration on House Prices in China
Carlos Garriga, Aaron Hedlund, Yang Tang, Ping Wang, Jan 27, 2021Rural-urban migration is an integral part of the dynamic process of structural transformation. The interplay between population inflows and house prices depends on various geographical differences in the economic and policy climate. In the case of China, we highlight particularly the roles played by location-specific hukou restrictions and local land supply.
