China has become a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), a data-intensive technology with the potential to transform the global economy. We argue that the Chinese state’s collection of data and provision of data to commercial firms contribute to China’s AI leadership. We provide supportive evidence from China’s facial recognition AI sector and develop a macroeconomic model that illustrates how the Chinese state's surveillance interest aligns with promoting AI innovation, but potentially at the expense of privacy.
Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities with more exposure to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities.
We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Decoupling in a technology field predicts China’s growing dependence on U.S. technology, which, in turn, predicts less decoupling further down the road...
The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s approach to environmental regulation and pollution. This review article examines recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years following the Chinese government’s announcement of its “war on pollution” in 2014. It also summarizes the emerging literature that has taken advantage of recent improvements in data availability and accuracy to understand the social, economic, and health impacts of environmental pollution in China.
Chinese firms are increasingly utilizing tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands to raise large sums of capital from foreign investors, accounting for over 60% of total offshore equities by 2020.