Search Results
Working Paper
The role of China in Asia: engine, conduit, or steamroller?
This paper assesses China's role in Asia as an independent engine of growth, as a conduit of demand from the industrial countries, and as a competitor for export markets. We provide both macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence. The macroeconomic analysis focuses on the impact of U.S. and Chinese demand on the output of the Asian economies by estimating growth comovements and VARs. The results suggest an increasing role of China as an independent source of growth. The microeconomic analysis decomposes trade into basic products, parts and components, and finished goods. We find a large role ...
Journal Article
China’s economic emergence
China is no longer the sleeping giant of yore. The country is showing its rapidly growing economic clout especially in the trade arena, where it has become the world?s third-largest trading nation.
Periodic Essay
China: an evolving housing market
Speech
Rebalancing the economy: a tale of two countries
Speech at a community leaders luncheon, Los Angeles, CA, November 8, 2013
Working Paper
Housing prices and the high Chinese saving rate puzzle
China?s over 25% aggregate household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast-rising housing prices in China. However, cross-sectional data do not show a significant relationship between housing prices and household saving rates. This article uses a simple consumption-saving model to explain why rising housing prices per se cannot explain China?s high household saving rate. Although borrowing constraints and demographic changes can translate housing prices to the aggregate saving rate, quantitative simulations of our model using ...
Journal Article
The economic rise of China: threat or opportunity?
China's economy is opening up to the outside world. This worries those who fear the huge pool of low-cost labor will drain jobs from U.S. shores, and less expensive goods will spark trade problems. The author points out that China's untapped market presents huge opportunities for U.S. businesses that would surely outweigh any loss of jobs, and also that the sort of jobs that would move to China left the U.S. a long time ago. And with respect to fair trading practices, China has made much progress.
Newsletter
China up close: understanding the Chinese economy and financial system (special issue)
In March 2007, the authors paid a weeklong visit to Beijing and Shanghai, China. In this article, they summarize some of the most striking impressions from their visit concerning the Chinese economy and financial system.
Working Paper
Nominal and real disturbances and money demand in the Chinese hyperinflation
This paper reexamines the dynamics of hyperinflation by allowing variability in the relative price of capital goods in units of consumption goods that reflects interactions between the real and monetary sectors. The theory generates empirically testable implications that suggest expanding the standard Caganian money demand function to include both anticipated inflation and relative price effects in a nonlinear fashion. Employing data from the post-World War II Chinese hyperinflationary episode, the empirical findings suggest that conventional econometric investigations of money demand during ...
Journal Article
Can rising housing prices explain China’s high household saving rate?
China?s average household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast-rising housing prices and other living costs in China. This article uses simple economic logic to show that rising housing prices and living costs per se cannot explain China?s high household saving rate. Although borrowing constraints and demographic changes can help translate housing prices to the aggregate saving rate, quantitative simulations using Chinese data on household income, housing prices, and demographics indicate that rising mortgage costs contribute ...
Journal Article
Update on China: a monetary policymaker's report
Each year, the President of the San Francisco Fed joins the Federal Reserve Board Governor responsible for liaison with Asia on a "fact-finding" trip to the region. These trips advance the Bank's broad objectives of serving as a repository of expertise on economic, banking, and financial issues relating to the Pacific Basin and of building ties with policymakers and economic officials there. The knowledge gained and the contacts developed are critical in understanding trends affecting the Twelfth District, in carrying out responsibilities in banking supervision, and in ensuring that ...