Remaking Monetary Policy in China


Book Description

This book covers the recent history of Chinese monetary policy. While most current work focuses on This book traces and explains the evolution of Chinese monetary policy in the years before 2008. The turn towards interest rate deregulation and market-oriented policy in China in recent years is often seen as a break with former command-and-control policy norms, in favour of Western central banking norms. We argue that Chinese monetary policy already went through a transformation under the influence of ‘new consensus’ macroeconomics after 1998, but that this surprisingly led to increased reliance on direct banking controls in the 2000s. Therefore, many of the controls that look to many like a remnant of central planning are in fact an outcome of an earlier attempt to ‘rationalise’ monetary policy, in unusual Chinese conditions. Specifically, policy returned to direct controls because of an underdeveloped interbank money market, and a glut of bank liquidity associated with enormous foreign exchange inflows in the mid-2000s.




Remaking the Chinese Leviathan


Book Description

This book examines a wide range of governance reforms in the People's Republic of China, including administrative rationalization, divestiture of businesses operated by the military, and the building of anticorruption mechanisms, to analyze how China's leaders have reformed existing institutions and constructed new ones to cope with unruly markets, curb corrupt practices, and bring about a regulated economic order.




China's Great Train


Book Description

Lustgarten's book is a timely and provocative account of China's unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and the nation's obsession to transform its land and its people.




One Road, Many Dreams


Book Description

One Belt, One Road is China's bold plan to remake the global economy. It's an ambitious strategy with a $2 trillion – and rising – budget. The objective? To challenge the existing economic and political world order. One Road, Many Dreams reveals the true extent of China's ambition, analyses the impact of the One Belt, One Road initiative and assesses its chances of success and failure. This is the Asian century and China has a plan – to remake the world economy. Under its audacious One Belt, One Road strategy, China is investing trillions of dollars in hundreds of projects all around the globe. It's buying up ports, building transport networks and constructing major infrastructure. From hydroelectric plants to oil pipelines, China supplies the labour if needed, the raw materials and the finance, creating customers and boosting its own economy in the process. More than 80 nations have already joined China's increasingly less exclusive club and by 2049, when One Belt, One Road is set to end, its number of members is likely to rival the UN. So far, China has exercised its soft power of debt diplomacy and financial might shrewdly, serving the planet's overlooked middle-income and poor countries. The rest of the world needs to wake up because the scale of One Belt, One Road is unprecedented. Its implications for the global structure of power are potentially seismic as the geopolitical ties between Europe and Asia deepen. Written by three highly regarded political economists, One Road, Many Dreams examines the One Belt, One Road initiative from all angles. It looks at the projects and the players, the alliances and the governance. It explores the opportunities for China and the threat to the West, particularly for Trump's isolationist US administration. At home and abroad, China is staking its credibility as a superpower on One Belt, One Road. Its resources appear limitless, but One Road, Many Dreams asks a tough question: has China overreached? Or can it really pull this off and remake the world economy in its own interests?




Fintech and the Remaking of Financial Institutions


Book Description

FinTech and the Remaking of Financial Institutions explores the transformative potential of new entrants and innovations on business models. In its survey and analysis of FinTech, the book addresses current and future states of money and banking. It provides broad contexts for understanding financial services, products, technology, regulations and social considerations. The book shows how FinTech has evolved and will drive the future of financial services, while other FinTech books concentrate on particular solutions and adopt perspectives of individual users, companies and investors. It sheds new light on disruption, innovation and opportunity by placing the financial technology revolution in larger contexts. - Presents case studies that depict the problems, solutions and opportunities associated with FinTech - Provides global coverage of FinTech ventures and regulatory guidelines - Analyzes FinTech's social aspects and its potential for spreading to new areas in banking - Sheds new light on disruption, innovation and opportunity by placing the financial technology revolution in larger contexts




The State Strikes Back


Book Description

China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.




The Coming Collapse of China


Book Description

China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.




The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World


Book Description

This book brings together researchers from different analytical perspectives for the study of contemporary geoeconomics to create a broader and more useful catalogue of conceptual tools, empirical entry points, and case studies around the subject. The distinctive contribution this book offers is its firm rooting in International Political Economy and the hitherto under-researched geoeconomics dynamics of Europe. Many existing accounts of geoeconomics have been developed in International Relations and often reproduce some of the state-centric and static assumptions of the discipline. Recent scholarship furthermore tends to focus on the US-China rivalry, thus discounting the role of other global powers in shaping geoeconomics. As a first collective contribution to the topic in the field of International Political Economy, the book stands to become a major reference point in the field for the coming years. Interest in geoeconomics as well as in related concepts like weaponized interdependence or emerging new rivalries has been on the rise in recent years and will be one of the key research areas in the coming decade of transition and change in Europe and beyond. Chapters 1, 2 and 7 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.




China's Future


Book Description

China's future is arguably the most consequential question in global affairs. Having enjoyed unprecedented levels of growth, China is at a critical juncture in the development of its economy, society, polity, national security, and international relations. The direction the nation takes at this turning point will determine whether it stalls or continues to develop and prosper. Will China be successful in implementing a new wave of transformational reforms that could last decades and make it the world's leading superpower? Or will its leaders shy away from the drastic changes required because the regime's power is at risk? If so, will that lead to prolonged stagnation or even regime collapse? Might China move down a more liberal or even democratic path? Or will China instead emerge as a hard, authoritarian and aggressive superstate? In this new book, David Shambaugh argues that these potential pathways are all possibilities - but they depend on key decisions yet to be made by China's leaders, different pressures from within Chinese society, as well as actions taken by other nations. Assessing these scenarios and their implications, he offers a thoughtful and clear study of China's future for all those seeking to understand the country's likely trajectory over the coming decade and beyond.




China's Gilded Age


Book Description

Why has China grown so fast for so long despite vast corruption? In China's Gilded Age, Yuen Yuen Ang maintains that all corruption is harmful, but not all types of corruption hurt growth. Ang unbundles corruption into four varieties: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, and access money. While the first three types impede growth, access money - elite exchanges of power and profit - cuts both ways: it stimulates investment and growth but produces serious risks for the economy and political system. Since market opening, corruption in China has evolved toward access money. Using a range of data sources, the author explains the evolution of Chinese corruption, how it differs from the West and other developing countries, and how Xi's anti-corruption campaign could affect growth and governance. In this formidable yet accessible book, Ang challenges one-dimensional measures of corruption. By unbundling the problem and adopting a comparative-historical lens, she reveals that the rise of capitalism was not accompanied by the eradication of corruption, but rather by its evolution from thuggery and theft to access money. In doing so, she changes the way we think about corruption and capitalism, not only in China but around the world.