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Working Paper
China’s Current Account : External Rebalancing or Capital Flight?
This paper examines an anomaly in China?s current account: its large and rapidly growing travel expenditure. Drawing evidence from counterparty data, Chinese international arrival statistics, and gravity equation models extended to travel trade, I find that a significant amount of China?s travel spending in the period 2014-2016 could not be explained by accounting factors or economic fundamentals. The unexplained travel imports are inversely associated with domestic growth and positively associated with renminbi depreciation expectations against the dollar, suggesting that they are less ...