Sharp increase in house prices combined with the extraordinary lending growth in Mainland China during 2009 has led to concerns of an emerging real estate bubble. We find that, for China as a whole, the current levels of house prices do not seem significantly higher than would be justified by...

The worst of the global financial crisis is probably behind us, but the trajectory to recovery may vary widely across economies. Employing a dynamic structural multi-country model with a financial accelerator, this paper studies the role of three important policy actions in economic recovery:...

The current financial crisis differs from most post-war recessions in that the balance sheets of both households and banks have been severely damaged, which could lead to structural changes in the behavior of households. Therefore, it may exert some far-reaching effects on regional economies in...

Hong Kong has seen strong growth in labour productivity since 2002. Sectoral breakdown shows that the advance in output per labour has been mainly supported by the expansion in financial and trade related activities attributable to the vibrant increase in offshore trade and exports of financial...

Property prices in Hong Kong increased markedly in late 2007 and early 2008, raising concerns about the risk of overheating in the property market. In this paper, we use co-integration analysis to analyze the short- and long-run determinants of property prices in Hong Kong. We find that the...

This paper studies the interaction between foreign trade and domestic demand and supply in China¡¦s economic transformation. It compares China¡¦s export dependency with other economies using input-output analysis. The paper also conducts econometric analysis of provincial level data to...

This paper develops a composite real activity index (RAI) using eight monthly activity indicators for the Mainland economy based on the methodology of the Conference Board. The RAI appears to be able to track the Mainland GDP growth quite well. The results from a logit regression indicate that...

This paper adopts a three-equation New Keynesian model to evaluate the appropriateness of China's monetary policy framework. Our simulation results show that a hybrid rule that relies on both interest rate and quantity of money to conduct monetary policy appears to be more suitable than its...