China’s household savings rate has been persistently high since the early 1980s despite rapid economic growth and contrary to the predictions of the standard consumption theory. Since China has undergone large structural changes in its transition to a market economy, precautionary savings seem to be a plausible contributing factor to the high savings rate. We use China’s large-scale reform of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify exogenous changes in income uncertainty. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE households’ wealth accumulation from 1995 to 2002.
China’s real estate market has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the COVID-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and inevitable. Based on input-output analysis and benchmarking against other economies, we estimate the size of China’s real estate–related activities to be 29% of the economy and conclude that the sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggregate growth shock.
The Chinese economy had spectacular growth in the past three decades, however the Chinese stock market had the worst performance among the major stock markets. Professor Franklin Allen from Imperial College, Professor Jun Qian from Fanhai International School of Finance, Fudan University, and coauthors offer their explanation of this puzzling divergence.
The article discusses how house prices have affected China's birth rate and explores the implications for the country's housing market and demographic future.
To encourage innovation, the Chinese government gave tax incentives to firms whose R&D intensity (as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures over total sales) exceeds a threshold that varies by their total sales. Using a major corporate tax reform in 2008, Professor Daniel Yi Xu from Duke University and his coauthors provide empirical evidence for some "strategic" behavior — including some relabeling of administrative expenditures as R&D — by the firms to take advantage of the tax incentives.