A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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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.
Ray of Hope? The Rise of Solar Energy in China
Ignacio Banares-Sanchez, Robin Burgess, Dávid László, Pol Simpson, John Van Reenen, Yifan Wang, Mar 25, 2026China’s solar subsidies triggered innovation and learning-by-doing that dramatically lowered global solar costs while generating domestic economic gains large enough to outweigh the subsidy costs, showing that green industrial policy can simultaneously boost growth and help fight climate change.
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.
