Currently a number of attempts are being made to claim a major revival of US industry is taking place. For example Harold L. Sirkin, of the Boston Consulting Group, writes: ‘A resurgence of U.S. manufacturing seems to be in the offing. With production costs rising in China, some companies are bringing their manufacturing back to the [...]

Book Review: End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Wang Hui (Verso 2011)

Apologists for Beijing sometimes like to say that nobody died on Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is the kind of statement whose technical accuracy is meant to be deceptive. It’s long been documented, if not fully embedded in public understanding, that [...]

The beginning of 2012 is a suitable moment to assess China’s economic prospects for the year and coming period. This overall perspective is clear - China will grow strongly, remaining the world’s fastest growing major economy, and will continue to substantially outperform Western pessimist predictions. This is the same fundamental analysis maintained by the author over the [...]

Commodity prices are a particularly sensitive indicator for the world economy due to their strong and pro-cyclical price fluctuations. These in turn are linked to supply inelasticities - the obstacles to and pronounced time delays in changing the supply of many commodities.
Agricultural commodities frequently require a minimum of a year to increase output due to [...]

The full scale of the difference in economic performance of China compared to the US, Europe and Japan during the international financial crisis is shown in Figure 1. It is summarised in the following figures:

In the four years to the latest available data, for the 3rd quarter of 2011, China’s [...]

As G20 leaders met in Cannes, they faced an economic situation in the developed economies best summed up by Goldman Sachs, the company which invented the term ‘BRIC’, as the ‘Great Stagnation’. Until recently developments following the financial crash of 2008 had been accurately termed the ‘Great Recession’ - describing the greatest economic downturn since [...]

Attempts to assess current prospects for the world economy have primarily focused on deceleration  in US and European GDP growth. But world trade is clearly also indicating negative trends.
Trade is a particularly sensitive indicator as its fluctuations have had a greater magnitude than those for GDP but have moved in the same direction. Trade data is [...]

The Greek debt crisis is both a significant economic event and a foreign policy success for Germany. It has, for the present, shifted the economic balance of power in Europe, and to some extent more widely, in Germany’s favour and against those in the US and Britain who do not favour the Euro and prefer a [...]

As Europe’s debt crisis intensifies again an interesting international aspect is the policy choices this poses for China.
It is a further sign of the growing international effect of China’s economic strength that it had already become part of the discussion on how to resolve Greece’s specific debt crisis - which is [...]

Recent data shows that the recovery of the US economy after the international financial crisis is much slower than in previous post-war business cycles and has decelerated. As Gavyn Davies, previously head of economics at Goldman Sachs, now a Financial Times commentator and formerly an optimist on US recovery, noted on June 3:
“The US employment [...]