Kaiser’s despair on learning that last week’s Sinica episode had been lost in a freak weather accident turned quickly to plotting. “We’ll simply have to make up for it somehow,” he mused. Which is how today’s special show came about: a better, stronger, and perhaps even genetically-modified weekend version of everyone’s favorite Chinese podcast. But no worries—our same off-the-cuff and no-holds-barred rules apply.
In the first of what will likely be many podcasts discussing some of the latest China-related revelations contained in the recent Wikileaks data-dump, our discussion today turns towards North Korea and Chinese diplomatic overtures suggesting that the country’s long-standing ally may be prepared to desert it, accepting a unified Korean peninsula under the control of an American-dominated South Korea.
China is poised on the brink of a transition to a service-based economy. The Japanese experience of the 1980s provides several insights about the way to manage such a transition and the downsides to avoid. In particular Japan offers useful insights on (1) the limits to an export-oriented growth strategy; (2) the role of exchange rate, macroeconomic policies, and structural reforms in rebalancing the economy toward the nontradables sector; and (3) the risks associated with financial liberalization. The similarities between the Chinese economy today and the Japanese economy of the 1980s make these insights relevant for China. However, with the benefit of analyzing the Japanese experience and, given the important differences between the two economies, China should be able to successfully rebalance its growth pattern while avoiding the downsides encountered by Japan.
China’s household saving rate has increased markedly since the mid-1990s and the age-savings profile has become U-shaped. The authors find that rising income uncertainty and pension reforms help explain both of these phenomena. Using a panel of Chinese households covering the period 1989-2006, the authors document that strong average income growth has been accompanied by a substantial increase in income uncertainty. They conclude that rising income uncertainty and pension reforms can account for over half of the increase in the urban household savings rate in China since the mid-1990s as well as the U-shaped age-profile of savings.
This paper uses data from China's processing trade regime to analyze the role of trade costs on trade within global production networks (GPNs). Under this regime, firms are granted duty exemptions on imported inputs as long as they are used solely for export purposes. As a result, the data provide information on trade between three sequential nodes of a global supply chain: the location of input production, the location of processing (in China), and the location of further consumption. This makes it possible to examine the role of both trade costs related to the import of inputs (upstream trade costs) and trade costs related to the export of final goods (downstream trade costs) on intra-GPN trade. The authors show that intra-GPN trade differs from regular trade in that it not only depends on downstream trade costs, but also on upstream trade costs and the interaction of both. Moreover, intra-GPN trade is more sensitive to oil price movements and business cycle movements than regular trade. Finally, the paper analyzes three channels through which intra-GPN trade have amplified the trade collapse during the recent global recession.
Support from the family continues to be an important source of support for the rural elderly, particularly the rural elderly over seventy years of age. Decline in likelihood of co-residence with, or in close proximity to, adult children raises the possibility that China's rural elderly will receive less support in the forms of both income and in-kind instrumental care. Although descriptive evidence on net financial transfers suggests that the elderly with migrant children will receive similar levels of financial transfers as those without migrant children, the predicted variance associated with these transfers implies a higher risk that elderly with migrant children may fall into poverty. Reducing the risk of low incomes among the elderly is one important motive for new rural pension initiatives supported by China's government, which are scheduled to be expanded to cover all rural counties by the end of the 12th Five Year Plan in 2016.
The vast majority of China's population lies to the southeast of a line running from Beijing to Sichuan. This entire region is subjected to major floods each year, while typhoons affect the southern and eastern coastal areas and major earthquakes affect the western and northern margins. The average annual direct property damage is estimated at approximately USD 15 billion, and when combined with other immediate economic losses, including business interruption, disaster relief, and other costs, is considerably larger. As with other sectors, insurance in China is growing rapidly, with a compounded annual growth rate of 25 percent since 2001. The property insurance industry, nevertheless, is underdeveloped. Clearly, the current property insurance market in China is dwarfed by the nation's need for catastrophe risk protection; at the present level of insurance penetration, China's insurance industry cannot provide significant compensation for large natural hazards losses.
The essays in this collection give voice to a wide range of artists and writers from China, Japan, Korea, and India who to this day remain largely unknown or poorly understood in literary circles around the world. Contributors from Asia, Europe, and the United States cover a wide range of topics from a vast expanse of time, from Sanskrit poetry dating back over a thousand years to Chinese fiction of the twenty-first century. —University of Chicago Press
One of the longest and most dramatic trade routes of the ancient world, the Tea Horse Road carried a crucial exchange for 13 centuries between China and Tibet. China needed war horses to protect its northern frontier, and Tibet could supply them. When the Tibetans discovered tea in the 7th century, it became a staple of their diet, but its origins are in southwest China, and they had to trade for it. The result was a network of trails covering more than 3,000 kilometres through forests, gorges and high passes onto the Himalayan plateaus, traversed by horse, mule and yak caravans, and human porters. It linked cultures, economies and political ambitions, and lasted until the middle of the 20th century. Re-tracing the many branches of the Road, photographer and writer Michael Freeman spent two years compiling this remarkable visual record, from the tea mountains of southern Yunnan and Sichuan to Tibet and beyond. Collaborating on this fascinating account, ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed’s description of tea and bio-cultural diversity in the region draws on her original doctoral research.—River Books
