Lauren Johnston

Getting Rich after Getting Old: China’s demographic and economic transition in dynamic international context

When incomes and living standards rise, households tend towards having fewer children, inducing a fall in the population growth rate. This is a pattern evident in the historical development of many countries once they have progressed beyond the Malthusian poverty trap (Day and Dowrick 2004). The resulting transition produces population ageing—a process whereby the proportion of old people within the total population increases (ILO 2009).

China's New Sources of Economic Growth: Vol. 1

In economic theory, ideas from new economic geography suggest that urban agglomeration can lead to economies of scale, technological progress and transaction cost reduction—and therefore lower energy consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, the spatial distribution of population and economic activities is a key factor influencing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, including the distribution of people within and between urban clusters.China’s change to a new model of growth, now called the ‘new normal’, was always going to be hard. Events over the past year show how hard it is. The attempts to moderate the extremes of high investment and low consumption, the correction of overcapacity in the heavy industries that were the mainstays of the old model of growth, the hauling in of the immense debt hangover from the fiscal and monetary expansion that pulled China out of the Great Crash of 2008 would all have been hard at any time. They are harder when changes in economic policy and structure coincide with stagnation in global trade and rising protectionist sentiment in developed countries, extraordinarily rapid demographic change and recognition of the urgency of easing the environmental damage from the old model. China’s economy has slowed and there are worries that the authorities will not be able to contain the slowdown within preferred limits. This year’s Update explores the challenge of the slowdown in growth and the change in economic structure. Leading experts on China’s economy and environment review change within China’s new model of growth, and its interaction with ageing, environmental pressure, new patterns of urbanisation, and debt problems at different levels of government. It illuminates some new developments in China’s economy, including the transformational potential of internet banking, and the dynamics of financial market instability. China’s economic development since 1978 is full of exciting change, and this year’s China Update is again the way to know it as it is happening

China’s Africa trade and investment policies: review of a “Noodle Bowl”

Increasing China-Africa economic integration has raised concurrent expectations for 20th Century goals of mutual development and fears of renewed African eco-nomic subjugation. Economic policies will be a key determinant of the degree to which either or both evolve. Given that importance, surprisingly few studies ex-plore the composition, distribution and multipliers of African or Chinese economic policies on the evolution and outcomes of China-Africa ties, nationally or intra-regionally. A step toward addressing that shortfall and also serving to highlight the pressing need for more research, this paper reviews China’s current set of sover-eign-level Africa-related trade and investment policies, their economic context and the associated impacts where known. Related policies are found to be a complicat-ed cross-continental matrix, in turn inspiring us to re-apply the ”noodle bowl” phrase that has elsewhere been used to describe bi-lateral policy overlap between

China’s Path Towards New Growth: Drivers of Human Capital, Innovation and Technological Change

Since the last China Update volume, sluggish world growth, of a touch above 3 per cent in 2016, has added to concerns about China’s financial sector and sustainable growth prospects at least in the near term. Geopolitical shocks in the United States and United Kingdom have exaggerated the uncertainty around whether China will be able to navigate away from an export, capital and resourceintensive growth model towards a new model of economic growth.

China’s ‘Innovative and Pragmatic’ Foreign Aid: Shaped by and now Shaping Globalisation

As the plenary speech on the first visit to Davos by a Chinese president, the speech itself is significant, but it offers little in the way of predictions of any material results on economic policy—a result both of the dynamic complexities of globalisation and of policymaking in China. Nonetheless, Xi’s call for greater adaptation to and better guidance of globalisation implies that any change will itself be dynamic. A stated goal of China’s increasing leadership in globalisation is delivery of mutually positive benefits to developing countries. In his Davos address, Xi therefore drew particular attention to China’s foreign aid and its contribution to global growth.

Where Is the Chinese Economy Going? A Forum on Contemporary Policy and Performance: Where Is the Chinese Economy Going?

China adopted a new model of growth from 2011, requiring substantial structural change. This introductory article presents statistical evidence on progress so far. Change generally is in the required direction, but slow. There has been early but slow progress on re-orienting domestic demand towards consumption; substantial re-orientation from reliance on exports towards domestic demand; and rapid change at the margin in the energy mix towards low-emissions sources. Investment in human capital is proceeding rapidly along lines required by the new model. So far, productivity growth has been slow, raising questions about future progress.

China’s New Sources of Economic Growth: A supply-side perspective

The Chinese economy has continued to absorb massive pressures for structural change since the publication of China’s domestic transformation in a global context (Song et al. 2015). The increasing scarcity of labour and rising labour costs foreshadowed in The turning point in China’s economic development (Garnaut and Song 2006) have continued to constrict the old Chinese strengths linked to exports of labour-intensive manufactures. The overhang of excessive investment in infrastructure and heavy industry from the aftermath of expansion to counteract the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the debt that funded it requires large structural change independent of the longer-term pressures. The ageing of the Chinese population deriving from low fertility in the reform period has generated special challenges of growing old before getting rich (Johnston et al., Chapter 10, this volume). Global and domestic environmental imperatives have forced a reshaping of priorities for economic development and exerted their own pressure for change away from the old pattern of investment-led growth. Meanwhile, China grapples with the special challenges of transition from the ranks of the world’s middle-income countries into the developed world—the challenge of escaping the ‘middle-income trap’.