China’s economic growth has been declining continuously at a rapid rate since 2011. It dropped to 6.7% in 2016 by more than 3% from nearly 10% average growth rate during 1979–2010. As for its causes, there are different interpretations among Chinese economists. One of the interpretations, which is held by some scholars including Justin Yifu Lin, is that external and cyclical factors are the main causes for the decline. The author disagrees with this viewpoint and holds that the root cause of economic deceleration is the delay in deep institutional reforms. An inclusive economy and state coercive capacity are two essential ingredients for sustaining economic prosperity. China must further enhance economic inclusiveness, and accelerate its transition into an efficiency-driven and innovation-driven economy through deepened comprehensive marketization reforms. Meanwhile, it should further strengthen the rule of law to build a limited government that is capable, accountable, effective and caring.

China’s growth decelerated substantially after 2010. This paper argues that the main cause for the deceleration is external and cyclical, China has a potential growth rate of 8%, the economy has good investment opportunities and resources, and China is likely to achieve a medium-high growth rate of around 6.5% in the coming years. The paper also examines the various structural reforms that can help China to release its growth potential and complete the transition to a well-functioning market economy.

The recent China’s growth slowdown is both cyclical and secular, driven by external and internal factors. In this article, I highlight several key internal factors that have hindered China’s growth in recent years. These include worsening misallocation of resources and declining growth of total factor productivity, plus rising household income inequality and debt overhang in the face of tightened liquidity constraint. All of these show the urgency for deepening reforms in China’s key macroeconomic landscapes in order to remove institutional barriers and distortions deep-rooted in the nation’s economic and financial structure, and to correct fundamental imperfections of its social- economic system. I argue that such reforms are of critical importance for China’s pursuit of healthy and sustainable growth and of balanced and adequate development going forward.

The paper discusses the falling back of economic growth from four aspects. From the aspect of production, the traditional industry has the greatest impact on the falling back of economic growth. From the perspective of demand, the consumption demand, investment demand, and export demand have jointly caused the falling back of the economic growth, in which the pulling function of investment demand is more obvious. From the standpoint of cardinality, the growth rate of the economy is restrained by the increase of economic scale. From the perspective of production factors, changes in the supply of labor force affect the falling back of economic growth rate.

Faced with complicated external and internal challenges, China’s economy continues to see sluggish growth in 2018. Rapid accumulation of household debts, exacerbation in income inequality, tightened real sector liquidity, escalated trade tensions with the US, and weakened external demand pose key problems in China’s macroeconomic landscape. The status quo is exacerbated by soaring uncertainty and weakening confidence in the face of persistent resource misallocations and institutional distortions, which cast more shadow on the already dampened consumer sentiment, sluggish private investment growth, and fallen foreign reserves. This summary report highlights the urgency of deeper structural reforms for tackling the various internal and external problems. Based on the IAR-CMM model, with both cyclical and secular factors taken into consideration, our baseline forecast of real GDP growth rate is 6.4% (6.1% using more reliable instead of the official data) in 2019. Alternative scenario analyses and policy simulations are conducted to assess the consequences of possible downside risks and the corresponding policy options needed to ensure the assumed growth targets. These analyses lead us to conclude that comprehensively deepening reform and opening up, which should be both rule-of-law based and market-oriented, with well-designed and well-conceived strategies that properly weigh short-, medium-, and long-term benefits and costs, should continue to be set as the guidance for China’s transformation into a phase with sustainable and high-quality growth.

In the light of the fact that there has been substantial growth in China’s exports in last three decades, particularly after China joined the WTO in 2001, this article investigates the major sources of China’s export performance during 2002–2014 by using the constant market share (CMS) model. In this study, exports are further decomposed in three categories based on their technological intensity using Lall (2000) classification on 3 digit SITC Revision-3 data provided by UN Comtrade via WITS database. The categories are high technology, medium technology and low technology. It is found that growth of China’s exports has, moreover, remained above world exports growth in all three categories during the period of study. The analysis reveals that export performance is mainly attributed to its competitive strength in the global market, though decreasing trend has been observed in the competitiveness of all three categories. Increasing cost of labor and appreciating RMB could be the causes behind decreasing competitiveness of Chinese exports. Product structure effect, on an average, has turned out to be negative in all the categories which is the most disturbing aspect of China’s export performance. On the other hand, geographical structure effect has positive impact on export performance of high-technology based exports whereas it has negative impact on export performance of low-technology and medium-technology based exports. China being the world’s largest exporter, decreasing competitiveness and wrong product structure effect could adversely influence its export performance in particular and its growth in general.

Impact of coordination costs and market size on a firm’s choice of technology is studied in a general equilibrium model in which firms engage in oligopolistic competition. A firm establishes an organizational hierarchy to coordinate its production. First, it is shown that an increase in market size leads a firm to choose a more specialized technology. Second, surprisingly, a robust result is that an increase in the level of coordination efficiency leads a firm to choose a less specialized technology.