No middle-income trap for China

Project China trap PIC - businesstimes.com.sg
Project China trap PIC - businesstimes.com.sg

The days of 10% annual growth for the Chinese economy have ended, as was inevitable. But there is good reason to believe that the real story is not the slowdown, but the shift in Chinese output from quantity to quality. STEPHEN S. ROACH* writes

BEIJING: There has always been a fixation on Chinese economic growth. And with good reason. For a large economy, sustaining annual growth rates of 10% over several decades is unprecedented.

And yet that’s exactly what China did from 1980 to 2011. But now the miracle is over. Since 2012, annual growth has slowed to 7.2 percent, and Premier Li Keqiang’s recent annual “work report” set a growth target of just 6-6.5 percent for 2019.

Editor's Comment
Time to end informal sector fronting

The Francistown Umbrella Informal Sector chairperson, David Mbulawa, has highlighted this growing concern, revealing that many local traders are using their licences to facilitate the entry of foreign goods into the market at a fee.Fronting undermines the very fabric of our local economy. It allows foreign traders to exploit the system designed to benefit Batswana, using local licences to cross borders and sell goods at prices intended for local...

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