The paper offers an empirical taxonomy of the factors driving China's current account. A simple present-value model with non-tradeable goods explains more than 70 percent of current account variability over the period 1982-2007, including the persistent surpluses since 2001. Expected increases...

We define decoupling as an increase in the cross-country heterogeneity in long-term growth expectations. We identify growth expectations from a cointegrating relation between a country's output level and its stock market valuation. Fluctuations in this output-price or yp-ratio reflect changes in...