IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecpoli/v39y2024i119p517-548..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rethinking China’s growth

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth Rogoff
  • Yuanchen Yang

Abstract

China’s outsized growth has almost continually surpassed outsiders’ expectations for four decades and may continue to do so in the future. However, a key element of the growth model, heavy reliance on real estate and infrastructure construction, may finally be running into diminishing returns. This paper summarizes new city-level data on China’s real estate and infrastructure capital from 2000 to 22 and provides evidence suggesting that the growth returns to new building may be falling in some regions. At the same time, real estate investment in particular has been a significant contributing factor to the local government debt vulnerabilities. Finally, the paper presents new findings on the combined direct and indirect impact of real estate and infrastructure construction on China’s economy, which has consistently exceeded 30% of GDP in recent years.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth Rogoff & Yuanchen Yang, 2024. "Rethinking China’s growth," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 39(119), pages 517-548.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:39:y:2024:i:119:p:517-548.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/epolic/eiae022
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    F39; G01; O40; R31;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F39 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Other
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General
    • R31 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Housing Supply and Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:39:y:2024:i:119:p:517-548.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebruuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.