China’s Great Numbers Game

It’s one thing for Chinese President Xi Jinping to target the head of a national bureau – he has replaced many high-level officials since becoming president. It’s another for that bureau to be so filled with corruption and inaccuracy that the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) has to admit it. Read Here – Geopolitical […]

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China’s Pain Points

Here are some of China’s economic pain points: bloated state-owned companies; banks with rising bad loans and local governments drowning in debt; massive overcapacity in the property market; bad investment in the wrong places. Read Here – Bloomberg

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China’s Self-Inflicted Demographic Disaster Is Here

The liberalization of the one-child policy had been expected—and virtually inevitable. China, after all, is heading toward accelerated demographic decline. The country’s population is now projected to peak in 2028, well before the 2030–2035 timeframe expected just a half decade ago. In all probability, the top will be reached earlier, maybe in 2020. Read Here […]

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China’s Economy May Be Even Bigger Than You Think

With China set to announce its third-quarter gross domestic product report on Monday, skepticism over its economic data is arising anew. Recall that Bill Gross has described China as “the mystery meat of emerging-market countries.” Premier Li Keqiang, before taking that post, said he didn’t rely on official statistics. He preferred things like rail freight and […]

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Pakistan’s Political Economy

A COUNTRY which was clocking a growth rate a shade above 5pc per annum for most of its history is now finding that this rate has dropped to below 4pc. It gives the impression that this is the new equilibrium rate that we may have to live with for some time. What explains this lacklustre […]

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Could The ‘Asian Century’ Already Be Petering Out?

The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once called the epoch stretching from the French Revolution of 1789 to World War I’s outbreak in 1914 as the “long 19th century.” A little over a decade ago, people began to speculate about an emerging “Asian century,” driven by an unstoppable China and enabled by America’s supposed inevitable […]

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Are China’s GDP Numbers Believable?

Almost immediately after the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics released its second quarter GDP growth estimate of 7 percent in mid-July, a group of China watchers were crying foul. China officially targeted full-year growth of around 7 percent in 2015, a number matched exactly by its reported GDP figures for the first half of the […]

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