Apologies (as always) to Shakespeare. From Sun Yu in the FT:
Category Archives: China
A Search for a Phillips Curve in China
I wondered whether Chinese inflation behavior was anomalous. Answering that question depends critically on (1) what model you believe in, (2) what you believe the model parameters are, (3) what you think the input values are, and (4) whether you think the model has been stable over time. Here’s one answer.
China Upside Surprise
Q2 GDP and June industrial production above consensus. Retail sales slightly below.
China in Recession?
Interview on CNN with LingLing Wei today, she doesn’t say “recession”, but the idea is there (“struggling, ‘big time'”I think is the phrase). Here’s a picture of industrial production ex.-construction through May, and ECRI’s recession dates (peak-to-trough):
China, Mid-2023: Teetering on Deflation
The June numbers for Chinese inflation surprised on the downside: 0.0% headline vs. +0.2% y/y Bloomberg consensus, -5.4% PPI vs. -5.0% consensus. Continue reading
The Dollar’s Role: Prospects
From D. Fried, CBO Working Paper (summary):
Assessing the Cross-Taiwan-Straits Military Balance
400 Harpoon missiles to Taiwan is a good development. But clearly more is going to be necessary. A leaked document recounted in WaPo assesses the current military situation.
Event: “Managing the U.S.-China Trade and Technology Conflict: Is There a Better Way?”
A CMU-UW Madison-Columbia U-Rand zoom event on “Managing the US-China Trade and Technology Conflict: Is There a Better Way?” (April 17th) with experts (some of whom are coauthors, colleagues, and friends of mine).
“So China is now paying us billions of dollars in tariffs”
That’s economist Trump in 2018, as cited in Coy (2018). Now, from USITC “Economic Impact of Section 232 and 301 Tariffs on U.S. Industries” (page 22), a conflicting assessment.
The Commission’s econometric model estimates that tariffs under sections 232 and 301 resulted in a nearly one-to-one increase in prices of U.S. imports following the tariffs. This implies that a 10 percent ad valorem tariff raised the price of U.S. imports from China by about 10 percent. This nearly complete pass-through (meaning that prices received by exporters were largely unaffected and prices paid by U.S. importers increased by the same amount as the tariffs) is unusual but has been similarly found by other recent studies, which conclude that U.S. importers have borne almost the full burden of section 301 tariffs.