A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Industrial Policy and Retaliatory Protection under the WTO:Lessons from China
Yusheng Feng, Haishi Li, Siwei Wang, Min Zhu, Aug 13, 2025Industrial policy is increasingly implemented worldwide, with many policymakers and researchers highlighting its benefits (Juhász et al. 2024). However, the cost of industrial policy remains less understood. Using Chinese firm-level data, we show that higher industrial subsidies raise the likelihood and severity of foreign anti-dumping and countervailing duties at each investigation stage (Feng et al. 2025). These retaliatory tariffs wipe out roughly a quarter of the firm revenue growth the subsidies would otherwise create. Neglecting this channel may lead governments to overstate the net benefits of industrial policy and fuels deeper trade frictions and geoeconomic fragmentation.
Beyond the Fundamentals: How Media-Driven Narratives Influence Cross-Border Capital Flows
Isha Agarwal, Wentong Chen, Eswar Prasad, Apr 02, 2025We provide the first empirical evidence on how media-driven narratives influence cross-border institutional investment flows. Applying natural language processing techniques to 1.5 million newspaper articles, we document substantial cross-country variation in sentiment and risk indices constructed from domestic media narratives about China in 15 countries. These narratives significantly affect portfolio flows, even after controlling for macroeconomic and financial fundamentals. This impact is smaller for investors with greater familiarity or private information about China and larger during periods of heightened uncertainty. Political and environmental narratives are as influential as economic narratives. Investors react more sharply to negative narratives than positive ones.
China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?
Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.
Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration
Dennis Egger, Benjamin Faber, Ming Li, Wei Lin, Nov 19, 2025Reductions in rural-to-urban migration barriers have led to economic gains for both rural origins and urban destinations by reducing information frictions and facilitating the flow of goods and investments between cities and the countryside.
Laboratories of Autocracy: The Landscape of Central–Local Dynamics in China’s Policy Universe
Kaicheng Luo, Shaoda Wang, David Yang, Feb 25, 2026This article shows how individual officials drive innovation, how competition shapes diffusion, and how a post-2013 turn toward central control has reduced local adaptation—often at a real economic cost.
