Can we believe China will reform its economy this time, given the empty promises of the past?
- The government cannot pursue stimulus like it did in the 2008 global financial crisis as piling on more debt would aggravate the current risks to the economy
- Significant economic reforms within China will be key to levelling the global playing field and preventing many foreign players from packing up and leaving
The China Dashboard, a joint project of the Asia Society Policy Institute and the Rhodium Group, has been tracking China’s economic policies since 2017. Having analysed objective data across 10 critical spheres of the country’s economy, we find that China’s reforms have been tepid to nonexistent in the past three years.
Moreover, because debt is a bigger problem for China now than it was in 2013, the government does not have the option of pursuing stimulus on the massive scale it did during and after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Piling on more debt would aggravate the current risks to the economy, which include a property market bubble and a swollen banking sector that, after a quadrupling of loan portfolios in the past decade, is sitting on mountains of shaky debt.
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Faced with these limitations, China’s government has put reform back on the agenda. On April 9, it issued a plan to improve the “market-based allocation of factors of production”. It followed that up on May 18 with a broad-spectrum manifesto that elevates “employment first” policies to the level of traditional fiscal and monetary policy.
This is all well and good, but can the world believe China this time? The government has yet to explain why the 2013 reform plan was not implemented, and the new reform pledges remain short on detail.
At the same time, private Chinese firms are holding back on further capital expenditures. If these business shifts continue, China’s ability to recover from the crisis will be hampered.
But if Hong Kong descends into violence again, and if China responds with extreme forms of repression under the new law, international firms will have less incentive to stay, further clouding the Chinese economy’s prospects.
In fact, the European Union is already pressing China for some of these changes in ongoing negotiations for a comprehensive bilateral investment agreement. We should know in the second half of the year whether China is prepared to assume the risks of genuine reform.
Significant economic reforms within China will be key to levelling the global playing field and preventing many foreign players from packing up and leaving.
Covid-19 is the greatest economic test China has faced in decades. The silver lining for China’s leaders is that the crisis affords them an opportunity to reorient the economy for sustained long-term growth through marketisation.
Will President Xi Jinping grasp this reality and seize the moment, or will he double down on the failed approach of the post-2013 period, when many promised reforms were sacrificed for fear of the change and instability they entailed?
Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia, is president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. Daniel Rosen is a founding partner of Rhodium Group. Copyright: Project Syndicate