Ross Garnaut

Macro-economic implications of the turning point

Chinas rapid growth in the reform era has been built around the availability of large amounts of migration from the countryside to the industrial cities, associated with only small increases in real wages. This pattern of growth has generated high savings, investment, rates of output growth, external payments imbalances, and high and growing inequality in the distribution of income. Slow and soon negative population and work force growth, rapid increase in modern sector demand for labor from an ever-higher base, and rapidly increasing investment in education per school-age person have absorbed most or all of the ‘surplus’ labor from the countryside, and rapid urban demand for labor is now associated with large increases in real wages in town and village. This paper explores analytically the effects of the exhaustion of underemployed labor in the countryside on these economic variables, and on the structure of trade and industry. It suggests some approaches to policy that can make this a favorable time for growth with equity in China.

How Rich is China?: Evidence from the Food Economy

In the late 1970s, the World Bank reported that Chinas 1976 per capita GDP was US

Principles and Practice of Resource Rent Taxation

410. This was more than twice as high as Indias, almost twice as high as Indonesias (US

The Financial Crisis: A Watershed in Economic Thought about East Asia

240) and higher than Thailands (US

The third revolution in the Chinese countryside

380). Over the next thirteen years, the same World Bank publications recorded average growth in real output per head in China at around 8 per cent per annum, which was substantially higher than in Thailand, and about twice as high as in India or Indonesia. During the same period, the real purchasing power of the US dollar fell by half. Yet the World Bank recorded Chinas per capita income in 1990 at US

China's third economic transformation : the rise of the private economy

370, about the same as Indias (US

The Contemporary China Resources Boom

350), much less than Indonesias (US

China＇s Role in Global Climate Change Mitigation

570), and about one-third that of Thailand (US

INDONESIA'S RESOURCES BOOM IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: POLICY DILEMMAS AND OPTIONS FOR CONTINUED STRONG GROWTH

1,420).1 This is a puzzle which, pending its resolution, raises doubts about the whole statistical basis of our understanding of Chinas growth performance in the era of reform. Has China really not grown so fast over the past d6zen years; have the economists of the EMF, the World Bank and the worlds main centres of scholarship been duped; and is China due one day for the sort of downgrading of perceived levels of output and rates of growth that Eastern Europe has experienced since the disintegration of the Berlin Wall? Or were the higher numbers for Chinas GDP that the World Bank was reporting a dozen years ago closer to the reality than the later, revised data, so that the recent data greatly underestimate GDP? The apparently conflicting observation of high growth and falling per capita GDP during the 1980s is partly a result of sizeable and successive depreciations of the Chinese currency (renminbi) relative to US dollars. But a

Issues in Commonwealth-State Funding

The Henry Review placed the taxation of rents from mines back on the national policy agenda. Mineral rent is potentially a source of neutral taxation. However, the various means of taxing resource rents in practice either fall short of the ideal of neutrality or collect for the revenue only a small proportion of the mineral rent. This article discusses the six principle instruments for taxing resource projects. It evaluates these forms of taxation in relation to stability, neutrality and government revenue maximisation. It suggests a combination of instruments that is likely to establish a good balance among objectives.