adam wolfe
Emerging Markets Economist at Absolute Strategy Research. Views are my own.
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A common misconception about China’s economy is that weak retail sales reflect weak household consumption. In fact, HH consumption accounted for >60% of GDP growth last year, a 30-...
The debate about China’s excess capacity and its exports has become silly and political. Yet there are clear examples of weak domestic demand driving a surge in its exports, helped...
China's annual migrant worker survey is out, and, as ever, it's a banger. Just a few of the hits: 1. Migrant employment in the construction sector fell by 6.5 million in 2023, the...
It’s been widely reported that Mexico overtook China as the top exporter to the US in 2023. But there’s a problem with these stories. They rely on US import data, and US imports fr...
China isn’t just trying to be the leading high-tech manufacturer. It’s also wants to manufacture everything. This goes against the typical development pattern and most economists’...
China’s not in a balance sheet recession. It has a different kind of problem than Japan in 1990 or the US in 2008, even if the outcome may look similar – subpar growth, weak inflat...
Why does consumption account for such a small share of China’s GDP? This is a big question, and there’s a lot of misleading information out there. But a cross-country comparison of...
Chinese youth unemployment is at a record high 20.4%. A lot of ink has been spilled the past few months explaining why that’s happened and what it says about China’s economy. The t...
Why have two official estimates of China’s trade surplus diverged by $270bn over the past year? It’s not data manipulation. Turns out, it’s another case of multinationals exploitin...
How China is reshaping global value chains in 3 charts. First, a decent chunk of the decline in its imports this year is due to a decline in the processing trade. Final assembly of...
Everyone is excited about the prospect of China’s reopening. Households have been sitting on a pile of cash and might go out and spend it in the coming months. GDP growth could pop...
Germany, Japan and Korea are all in trade deficit, but China’s surplus is on track to surpass $1tn this year. That shows just how weak domestic demand is. But if China’s trade surp...