The Turning Point In Chinas Economic Development

Focuses on China's long-term pattern of growth and employment, demographic shifts, and rural-urban migration, its agricultural trade and local elections, China's banking sector reform and its fiscal sustainability, its environmental concerns, and much more.

This book reviews and examines the reform and opening up in China from 1978 to 2011. It analyzes how China avoided to fall into the middle-income trap over those 33 years. The book makes a deep analysis of understanding how Chinese economy became a miracle in the world economic history and its development stages, as well as the overseas erroneous understanding of the existence of Chinese economy. The author analyzes from three aspects: how to break the “impossible triangle”, how to achieve middle-to-high speed growth in L model, and how to release a new dividend of urbanization. After Chinese economy entered the Lewis turning point, China faced the dilemma of labor transformation and the disappearance of demographic dividend, the demographic dividend turned to the reform dividend. The author points out and suggests that a new round of growth should be achieved by improving the total factor productivity in order to find a new way for the Chinese economy. This book plays an important role of comprehending Chinese economy under current complex economic situation. This book helps readers to understand Chinese economy from many aspects: impossible triangle, L model growth, Malthus trap, dual economy, aging problem, demographic dividend, reform dividend, trap of middle income, globalization, etc. The author as an economist aims for the public explaining the professional knowledge in a concise and easy way. This book delivers the information of discerning and understanding the economic trend, and predicting the future.

This book by influential policymaker Chi Fulin lays out in issue-oriented and detailed chapters, at a time when China is at a crossroads, exactly how the government plans to deal with the social, political and economic issues the world's second-largest economy faces. From managing the decline of industry, to urbanization, to managing consumption, to social security and education, Chi offers a roadmap for the years ahead. This book will be particularly fascinating to Western scholars of China who speculate on the inner workings of the Chinese policymaking elite, with the ambition of China's central planners here laid out for the world to see.

HUANG Yiping is Professor of Economics at the China Center for Economic Research, National School of Development, Peking University, China. He is also an adjunct professor at the Australian National University and a member of the China Finance 40 Forum. His current research focuses on macroeconomic policy, international finance and rural development. CAI Fang is Director, Professor and Fellow at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China. He serves as Vice Chairman of the China Population Association. His current research focuses on China’s labor migration, population and development, economic reform, income distribution and poverty.

This volume is concerned with labor market developments in China from a comparative perspective on selected East and South Asian countries. It closely examines the changing structure of China's labor market in the context of the Lewisisan turning point in ecomomic development.

This book by influential policymaker Chi Fulin lays out in issue-oriented and detailed chapters, at a time when China is at a crossroads, exactly how the government plans to deal with the social, political and economic issues the world's second-largest economy faces. From managing the decline of industry, to urbanization, to managing consumption, to social security and education, Chi offers a roadmap for the years ahead. This book will be particularly fascinating to Western scholars of China who speculate on the inner workings of the Chinese policymaking elite, with the ambition of China's central planners here laid out for the world to see. Fulin Chi is one of China's most influential policy thinkers. He is a research fellow, a doctoral supervisor, a member of the 11th and 12th National Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Director of China Institute for Reform and Development, concurrently Vice-president of China Society of Economic Reform, Vice-president of China Society of Administrative Reform, member of the Expert Committee for the 13th National Five-Year Plan, and specially-appointed professor at a number of higher education institutions including Chinese Academy of Governance, China Executive Leadership Academy Jinggangshan, Peking University, and Zhejiang University in China and Northeastern University in the United States.

This book explains why China’s opening-up policy can boost the rapid growth of its economy. Based on concrete facts and economic logic, it offers a brief introduction to the history of China’s successful development, which has unprecedentedly helped improve people’s lives and community welfare over the past 30 years. In light of the newly emerging problems, the author assesses the different stages of China’s economic development and new challenges, illustrating how the country’s sustainable growth could be achieved through further reforms so as to complete the transition from a middle-income to high-income country. He moves on to discuss the lessons learned from China’s experiences and summarizes their significance for other developing countries, while also clarifying popular misconceptions such as the “China Menace” and “Theory of China’s Collapse.” Taking the logic of economic development as a basis and employing economic norm analysis methods, the book describes China’s economic miracle in plain but vivid language and attempts to enrich the economic development theory through China’s experience.

China is on the eve of a demographic shift that will have profound consequences on its economic and social landscape. Within a few years the working age population will reach a historical peak, and then begin a precipitous decline. This fact, along with anecdotes of rapidly rising migrant wages and episodic labor shortages, has raised questions about whether China is poised to cross the Lewis Turning Point, a point at which it would move from a vast supply of low-cost workers to a labor shortage economy. Crossing this threshold will have far-reaching implications for both China and the rest of the world. This paper empirically assesses when the transition to a labor shortage economy is likely to occur. Our central result is that on current trends, the Lewis Turning Point will emerge between 2020 and 2025. Alternative scenarios—with higher fertility, greater labor participation rates, financial reform or higher productivity—may peripherally delay or accelerate the onset of the turning point, but demographics will be the dominant force driving the depletion of surplus labor.

'This book is a remarkable tour de force. Joseph Chai offers a fine synthesis of thinking about the nature and origins of China's long-run economic growth and structural change. Through the meticulous use of an impressive range of sources, he explores some of the most challenging puzzles of China's economic history, such as its failure to match the modern industrial revolutions of Western Europe, or, closer to home, to rival Japan's economic transformation in the final decades of the nineteenth century. His definition of history is broad and his narrative extends down to the present day, thereby illuminating continuities and discontinuities across not only the historical divides of 1840 and 1911, but also those of 1949 and 1979. But despite its ambitious scope, Chai's analysis is authoritative, nuanced and full of detail. It will surely become necessary reading not only within the academic community of China scholars and students, but also among that even larger audience of readers seeking to understand the "rise of China".' Robert Ash, University of London, UK 'For most people interested in the contemporary Chinese economy, the story begins with Deng Xiaoping's policy of Opening and Reform in 1978. This is especially true of students from China, where modern history is still taught in a simple, politically determined framework. This situation urgently needs remedying and Joseph Chai's new book is a valuable step in this direction. Chai surveys China's economic growth from the earliest times to the present day explaining the key turning points and the intellectual puzzles that arise in this long evolution. This book will be of interest to the general reader and will be valuable as a textbook for students studying any aspect of China's current development and prospects.' Christopher Howe, University of London, UK 'Joseph Chai places the recent phase of China's spectacular economic growth in its historical context in his well-researched, interesting and accessible overview of the economic history of China. Because no similar up-to-date book is available in English, English readers will find this book particularly welcome. Valuable attributes of his exposition include analyses of various economic puzzles (for example, why did China, which was once the world's economic leader, falter, suffer economic retardation, fall behind Europe and begin its economic resurgence later than Japan?) and his thoughtful considerations of the prospects for China's future economic growth. This book is highly recommended.' Clem Tisdell, The University of Queensland, Australia As a country's current development is path dependent, the rise of China and its strategic implications can only be understood in a historical context. Hence, the key to understanding contemporary China is the understanding of its past. So far there has been an absence of a comprehensive text dealing with Chinese economic history in the English language. An Economic History of Modern China fills this important gap, focusing on modern Chinese economic growth and comprehensively surveying the patterns of China's growth experience over the past 200 years, from the Opium wars to the present day. Key events are traced back to their foundations in history to explain their impact on China's modern economic growth.

How will China reform its economy as it aspires to become the next economic superpower? It's clear that China is the world's next economic superpower. But what isn't so clear is how China will get there by the middle of this century. It now faces tremendous challenges such as fostering innovation, dealing with ageing problem and coping with a less accommodative global environment. In this book, economists from China's leading university and America's best-known think tank offer in depth analyses of these challenges. Does China have enough talent and right policy and institutional mix to transit from input-driven to innovation-driven economy? What does ageing mean, in terms of labor supply, consumption demand and social welfare expenditure? Can China contain the environmental and climate change risks? How should the financial system be transformed in order to continuously support economic growth and keep financial risks under control? What fiscal reforms are required in order to balance between economic efficiency and social harmony? What roles should the state-owned enterprises play in the future Chinese economy? In addition, how will technological competition between the United States and China affect each country's development? Will the Chinese yuan emerge as a major reserve currency, and would this destabilize the international financial system? What will be China's role in the international economic institutions? And will the United States and other established powers accept a growing role for China and the rest of the developing world in the governance of global institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, or will the world devolve into competing blocs? This book provides unique insights into independent analyses and policy recommendations by a group of top Chinese and American scholars. Whether China succeeds or fails in economic reform will have a large impact, not just on China's development, but also on stability and prosperity for the whole world.