Gross domestic product (GDP) is shown to possess three new desiderata. First, GDP is almost perfectly correlated over time with the first principal component of its three classical indicators. Second, this principal component is in a class of weighted indexes ancillary to GDP. Each ancillary...

The extent of competition in product markets is an important determinant of economic growth in both developed and developing countries. This paper uses the 2008 vintage of the OECD indicators of product market regulation to assess the extent to which China’s regulatory environment is...

As a result of reforms and financial sector development, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) now exerts significant control over money market interest rates. With money market conditions increasingly influencing effective commercial lending rates, the PBoC is also able to affect the cost of...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

We propose a comprehensive decomposition of changes in a country’s global market shares that accounts for the value added content of trade. We perform the analysis by combining two datasets – disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade with internationally integrated Supply and Use Tables from...

China is taking a more active role on the world stage, even more so since its rapid and strong recovery from the global recession. In the financial realm this expansion is underpinned by a strategy to build strong and competitive capital markets at home. In order to achieve this goal,...

Increased population pressure and political decisions have led to more intensive agricultural practices in China. As in other regions of the world, these practices can damage natural capital. We use the Kalman filter and Chinese panel data to estimate an index of environmental productivity...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as...

Despite the intensive efforts made by economists to examine regional income inequality in China, limited attention has been paid to disentangle the contribution of regional price differentials. This paper examines regional price differential in urban China over the period 1986 to 2001. Spatial...