Harry Wu Xiaoying
Research project
Assessing the characteristics of China’s growth episodes, jointly with Eric Girardin Professor of Economics Aix-Marseille-University (AMSE)
Project summary
The durable slowdown of the Chines economy in the wake of the global financial crisis keeps sending shock waves world wide as a mirror image to China’s boost to global growth a decade earlier. Is such a growth slowdown, even in official data, a sign that China’s potential rate of growth has collapsed from the Himalayan heights seemingly reached during its previous long-lasting great spurt (or miracle by Lin, Cai and Li, 2003)? While many Chinese scholars would provide a positive answer, other, equally prominent researchers (Lin, 2012), dissent from this downbeat assessment and see a huge untapped gap with the US frontier as a safe guarantee for high growth over the decade(s) ahead. The lesson from the extensive literature since the 1950s on growth in latecomers is that stable sustainable growth can only establish itself after a discontinuity associated with high-speed great spurt. We argue that to examine China’s long catching-up process especially post-1978 reform one needs to empirically detect and assess China’s growth episodes characterized by different speeds and durations, especially its often claimed, long-lasting great spurt episode. To this end we propose a novel approach that involves a focus on industrialization with a substantial data reconstruction effort, international benchmarking, and historical industrial growth-regime modeling.
