I have to confess to some frustration with some of the recent commentary on China coming from academic economists. Usually I value the perspectives from the academy as helping draw some needed attention to longer-term issues and away from the short-term noise that dominates the media and financial-market debates. But I think on China there is a tendency for some people to look past “simple” issues like the business cycle and housing in favor of discussing only complicated structural issues. Again, usually I’m all in favor of complex, historically nuanced explanations–but you can go too far with this stuff. Sometimes it’s really not that complicated.
Exhibit A is a survey of “top UK-based macroeconomists” about their expectations for China’s future growth. Many of the economists surveyed expect China’s GDP growth to be lower than 6% for several years, I view I agree with. The survey also asked for economists to give the reasons why they expect this slower growth, and here is what they came up with: “less space for catch-up growth,” “adverse demographic dynamics,” “problems in the financial sector,” “diminishing flows of rural-urban migrants,” “the ‘intentional’ rebalancing from high-growth industry to moderate-growth services,” “risks from ‘secular stagnation’ in developed economies.”
Exhibit B is a recent piece by Jeffrey Frankel, in which he lists no fewer than six economic forces behind China’s slowdown. Like the respondents to the UK survey, he also cites less space for catch-up growth, adverse demographic dynamics, diminishing flows of rural-urban migrants, and the rebalancing to services, while adding “diminishing return to capital” to the list (he leaves off secular stagnation in developed economies).
What I found amazing about these analyses is that they fail to even mention the most straightforward and direct explanation of why China’s growth is much slower today than it was in say, 2010 or 2007. It’s not like it’s a secret. From about 2003 to about 2010 China had the biggest construction boom of modern times and probably in all of human history. Then in 2011-12 the construction boom ended. That’s it. Really, that’s all you need to know. Well, you might need one more fact: housing and construction account for as much of a third of China’s GDP, once all their indirect linkages to other sectors are considered. I think a housing downturn explains very well the timing, severity and distribution of the economic slowdown that has actually occurred.
The long-term structural explanations favored by many academic economists–like the “middle-income trap,” demographics, etc–by contrast simply do not explain what China has been going through over the past few years. It’s possible that the diminishing return on capital argument is intended as a fancy way of accounting for the obvious downturn in housing investment. But here I have to agree with Michael Pettis when he says that “the deceleration in Chinese growth moreover has been far too rapid to be explained by any normal decline in marginal returns on capital as investment rises.”
As I have previously argued on this blog, the regional pattern of the slowdown is in fact very important. If China were really falling victim to the exhaustion of catch-up growth potential, then it would be experiencing a gradual slowdown, and the provinces slowing down would be those who had caught up the most. And this is not true; the high-income provinces are doing well while low-income provinces are hurting.
I have never really believed in the idea of the middle-income trap, and I increasingly feel that it is actually counter-productive in current discussions about China. If you think China is succumbing to the middle-income trap (in any of the various manifestations mentioned above) then you think China’s problems are complex and long-term in nature, and the proper response is a set of carefully calibrated structural and institutional reforms. If growth ends up worse than expected, you put the blame on the government for not taking the right policy prescriptions.
But if you agree with me that China is experiencing a lengthy downturn in housing construction that followed a lengthy boom in housing construction, then current rates of GDP growth are not primarily the result of the government’s failure to do structural reforms. That’s not to say structural reforms are not important–I do think the government should be liberalizing service sectors and taking other measures to improve the growth potential of the economy. The benefits of those reforms will however only show up further down the line, once the cyclical pressures from the downturn in housing have let up somewhat. None of the various structural reforms being debated today will do anything to change the fact that in the near term, China does not need to build a lot more housing. And that therefore business for companies related to housing construction (and there’s lots of those) will be poor.