Chinese Economics Thread

Equation

Lieutenant General
Long pegged as a currency manipulator, China might be about to get a big stamp of foreign-exchange credibility. The International Monetary Fund is reportedly close to calling the Chinese yuan fairly valued. That’s something that hasn’t happened in more than a decade, and it would come despite
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the White House, according to
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.




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China’s foreign-exchange reserves are falling, a signal that it’s not intervening as much to keep its currency weak to bolster exports.




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Its holdings of US government debt are falling, too, which shows that whatever US dollar reserves it does have aren’t being parked in Treasury debt to the extent that they used to be. In fact, Japan recently
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as the leading foreign holder of US debt.




And most importantly, the yuan has been floating more freely in recent years after a long time of being pegged to the US dollar.




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China hasn’t exactly set the yuan free, but it has been
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the band within which it can trade. All this is part of an effort to attain entrance to an exclusive club of currencies that make up the IMF’s
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(SDRs), a key marker of global reserve currency status. Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, laid out all the reforms the country is making—opening up financial markets, better current account analysis, etc.—
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to the IMF’s monetary and financial committee. A couple days earlier, IMF head Christine Lagarde
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that China was making decent progress.




The next committee meeting to review the SDR basket of currencies is expected to take place in the coming months, which will be the key moment to see if the reforms have been enough to solidify China’s credibility on currency.

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Ultra

Junior Member
Indeed! We don't need to wait 15 years to see this. Just look at what Chinese workers "retiring" today choose to do. They go into other sectors if they can: taxi driver, security guard, start their own small business, etc.

In fact, many (if not most) of them have probably saved up enough money to retire comfortably (relatively) in their village, and their children (they likely have 2) are in the labor force sending money home.

Sure, it's not as comfortable a life as in North America, where you can pick up pension cheques, but it's not a humanitarian disaster either.

I have rarely seen a 60+ year old taxi driver, or security guard. As they grow older - do you expect these people in their 60s and 70s to still be taxi driver and security guard? Also, as you grow older your stamina is not what you used to be, you can't expect to do jobs that requires long hours. The employers will not want to too as it can be a insurance liability. Let's not forget as you grow older health problems just spring up - when you are young and in your 40s, these problem will be minimal or not seen, but in your 60s+, these health problems becomes critical. High blood pressure, Arthritis, Cardiovascular diseases, vision and hearing loss, dental problems, Alzheimer, stroke, diabetes... a lot of these problem won't kill you right away, but can have massive effect as it impairs you or even paralyse you, this creates burden for the offsprings if state support is not there.

If you don't believe this is a problem, I suggest you go to the hospital and see the long line of elderly waiting for doctors to treat their long lists of health problems, now imagine there are far fewer newer generation to support these people as they are paralysed.
 

Ultra

Junior Member
Yeah but cost of living in China is far lower than in the US. That includes food and medicine.


I hope you don't mind me asking... but have you been to China lately?
One thing that shocked me when I visited Guangzhou is how expensive it is. Prices for a lot of everyday items are nearly on par with Australia (and we have the world's highest standard of living / price for everyday item in the world - companies even charge us extra!) !! Almost everything is more expensive there than in Taiwan. And Guangzhou is just the tip of iceberg - I am sure other less affluent cities and provinces probably have far lower CPI than Guangzhou, but as China prosper more cities will become like Guangzhou.


But you might think "Oh as China prosper that means everyone prosper" - sadly that's not going to be the case - that's the problem with capitalism - as the country prosper, not everyone will prosper. Economic inequality will intensify as the rich gets richer because of snowball effect (more money to buy you more asset which generate even more money and the virtuous cycle continues) while the poor gets poorer. What I have seen in Guangzhou confirms this - I have seen the rich (my in-laws are one them) and I have seen a lot of the desperate poor on streets most of them elderly - one time I even saw a junior high school student aged kid with a bunch of homeless sleeping on the street in extremely cold winter night of January (it was raining too, about 10 o' clock).



China is moving towards a more robust economic growth that doesn't required a whole army of hundreds of millions of migrant workers to do the jobs of robots and 3D manufacturing could do.


Yes, as China techs up and moving towards more efficient manufacturing and production process, the robotics are only going to benefit the factory owners and the business owners as they maximize their profit. But what about the hundreds of millions of migrant workers? What are they going to do?? Will the government subsidize them to help them go back to school so they can climb the high value chain jobs or prospect? Because if they don't these people will just be trap in their same predicament as they were before, forced to do the low paying jobs because of lack of skills or education. The problem won't go away just because China move towards robotics, in fact it will intensify the problem.
 
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Ultra

Junior Member
How about 2012? ;)


China gets richer but more unequal
About a third of China's wealth held by 1% of citizens, with disparity greatest between affluent east coast and poorer interior
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Chinese visitors to a business aviation exhibition walk past a luxury private jet. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
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in Beijing

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is becoming more unequal as it gets richer, with about a third of the country's wealth now concentrated in the hands of 1% of its citizens, according to new research.

A report by the
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also found that the poorest quarter of Chinese citizens owned only 1% of the country's wealth.

The report, which was covered extensively by China's state media, concludes that while the country is getting richer as a whole – the average net worth of a Chinese household rose 17% between 2010 and 2012 to $71,000 (£42,000) – inequality is a serious and growing problem.

It says the country's
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, a widely used indicator of economic inequality, has grown sharply over the past two decades.

A Gini coefficient of zero represents absolute equality, while one represents absolute inequality. About 20 years ago, China's Gini coefficient for family net wealth was 0.45,
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, a Communist party mouthpiece, but by 2012 it had risen to 0.73.


According to some analysts, societies that have a Gini coefficient of more than 0.40
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of widespread social unrest.
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gives the US the highest Gini coefficient in the G7, after taxes and transfers, at 0.39, followed by the UK at 0.34 and Italy at 0.32.

In the US,
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of the country's wealth.

The Chinese study, which took its data from a large-scale survey conducted by Peking University researchers in 2012, said nearly three-quarters of Chinese household wealth comes from property investments.


"This data is fresh. We know about national wealth, how much everybody's wealth has grown, but we still don't have many numbers on individual wealth," said Li Wei, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "I'm very glad that academic institutions are putting so much work into research, and presenting this data about how our economy is really doing.

"In the future, government departments should take responsibility for collecting this information and presenting it quickly and transparently."

Li said China's biggest wealth discrepancies used to be between rural and urban areas, but a major nationwide urbanisation campaign had narrowed the gap. The greatest economic divisions were now between the affluent east coast and the relatively impoverished interior, and among different areas of individual cities and provinces, he said.

According to a Credit Suisse's
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, about 1% of the world's population holds 46% of its total assets. The richest 10% of earners own 86% of all wealth, and the bottom half owns less than 1%.


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BTW, that 0.73 figure sounds incredible. I am not sure if that's correct. I think China is around 0.45+. If it is 0.73 we should be seeing civil war by now.
 
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Ultra

Junior Member
Another one, this is even more recent.


Gov't Statistician Cites New Data to Say Income Inequality Is Narrowing

A measure of wealth disparity continues to fall, head of National Bureau of Statistics says, calling it proof that urban-rural chasm is closing
By staff reporter Yu Hairong
01.20.2015 17:59

(Beijing) – A measure of income inequality called the Gini coefficient has dropped in recent years due to government measures to close the gap between urbanites and farmers, the director of the official statistics bureau says.

Ma Jiantang, the head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said on January 20 that China's coefficient dropped from 0.473 in 2013 to 0.469 in 2014. He interpreted this as a sign income discrepancies had narrowed.


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Ma said the index's decline in recent years – the official Gini coefficient has fallen since 2008 – are proof that government efforts to close the income gap separating urbanites and people in rural areas are working.

Economists around the world use the Gini coefficient to gauge income inequality. The index ranges from 0, meaning complete equality of income, to 1, or total inequality. The .4 mark is regarded as a red line.

Other experts in China come up with higher results for China's Gini coefficient. Researchers at the Southwest University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, published results in December 2012 that put the figure at 0.61. The same year, the China Society of Economic Reform, a non-governmental group, surveyed 5,344 households and came up with a Gini coefficient of 0.501.

The NBS stopped publishing the Gini coefficient in 2004, then in 2013 it released a decade's worth of figures. The prompted some economists to question the credibility of the data.

NBS said that its data is based on a survey of the incomes of 400,000 households.

Critics say its approach is flawed because high-income families are disproportionately represented and they are less forthcoming about their income. They also say income levels for urban residents are underestimated because these families often have multiple sources of income that are not counted.

The NBS also said that the disposable income of workers in the country rose 8 percent from a year earlier to an average of 20,167 yuan last year. Rural workers saw disposable income grow by 9.2 percent to 10,489 yuan; the figure for urbanites rose 6.8 percent to 28,844 yuan. Those figures factored in differences in prices for certain goods people had to buy.


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Franklin

Captain
The gini coefficiency in China is getting better because China is moving up the value chain rapidly. They are creating well paying technical jobs on mass. The reason why gini coefficiency in places like Europe and the US are getting worse is because they are barely creating any high paying technical jobs. Industry and higher end production is the best way to create a middle class. Because it involves workers with much higher skill sets therefor better pay and these jobs are not so easily transfered abroad. The lower skilled labour in this situation is going into the lower end services sectors like shopping malls, restaurants and other places of leisure as people working these technical jobs have studied hard and are reaping the fruits of it by able to make more money. They want to live the good life and therefor increase the demand for the aforementioned services. It is also helping to create higher end services jobs as the economy grows and people are wealthier comes with increasing demand for services like accounting, banking, insurance, legal protection and medical services. And the growth in management to keep the growing economy ticking. This is reflected in China's booming services industry that is now bigger and growing faster than the manufacturing sector. The growing wealth in China is seen in the double digit increases in the sales of everything from movie tickets, rides on HSR, foreign vacations and the increase of soft imports like wine, chocolate, whisky etc. These are all signs that more and more people in China have more and more disposable income.
 
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