Excerpt
September 26, 2023, Paper: "China’s outsized growth has almost continually surpassed outsiders’ expectations for four decades, and may continue to do so in the future. However, a key element of the growth model, heavy reliance on real estate and infrastructure construction, may finally be running into diminishing returns. This paper summarizes new city-level data on China’s real estate and infrastructure capital from 2000-2022, and presents evidence suggesting that the growth returns to new building may be falling in some regions. At the same time, real estate investment in particular has been a significant contributing factor to the local government debt vulnerabilities in some regions. Finally, the paper presents new results on the combined direct and indirect impact of real estate and infrastructure construction on China’s economy, which has consistently exceeded 30 percent of GDP in recent years."