Larry Thomas — Furniture Today,
\nMYRTLE BEACH, S.C. \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Calls for China to revalue its currency are misguided and would do little to help its trade imbalance with the United States, an expert on the Chinese economy told furniture finance executives here.<\/p>\n
Albert Keidel, a fellow at the Carnegie Institute and former Treasury Department official, said currency revaluation is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153total red herring\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that could slow the influx of capital into China and curtail Chinese purchases of U.S. Treasury securities.
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Neither outcome would be good for the Chinese economy and could hamper the U.S. government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to sell its securities, Keidel said in a speech at the AHFA Finance Division annual meeting here.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We have to move in the direction of higher productivity and technology \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and help them with their system of intellectual property rights,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Keidel told attendees.<\/p>\n
He said that while U.S. imports from China have soared in recent years, imports from non-Chinese sources have fallen since 2000.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is a tendency to brand China as a cheater,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Keidel said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look at the bilateral trade balance, look at the worldwide figures.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
He said the Chinese economy is growing at a warp-speed rate of 10% annually, and that even if the rate slows to 8% to 9%, it will eclipse Japan by 2025 and be bigger than the U.S. economy by 2040.<\/p>\n
However, China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s standard of living will remain well below that of the U.S. or Japan for decades. Keidel said that even by 2050, China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s standard of living would be comparable to a poorer European country such as Spain.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153China is not what Japan was in the 1980s,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, referring to the hyper-expansion of the Japanese economy in those days. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Its per capita Gross Domestic Product is much less than either Japan or the U.S.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
He credited the Chinese government with making \u00e2\u20ac\u0153smart, practical decisions\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that have aided economic growth, especially an emphasis on infrastructure such as roads, hospitals, schools and communications systems. And he noted there is far less government corruption in China than in emerging nations of Southeast Asia or Africa.<\/p>\n
The corruption that most frequently occurs, Keidel said, surrounds commercial transactions. He said bribes, or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153side payments\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as they are sometimes called, are relatively common but still less prevalent than in many Asian or Latin American economies.<\/p>\n
However, he said a state-sponsored development bank that loans money to cities and counties for infrastructure improvements has all but ignored the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153horrible problem\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of air pollution. And as visitors from the U.S. are frequently warned, the vast majority of the population lacks clean drinking water.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nobody is going to volunteer to make improvements (to air and water quality) because it would put factory owners at a competitive disadvantage. And the government would rather put resources into other areas, such as transportation,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Keidel told the group.<\/p>\n
But he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see the Chinese government de-emphasizing growth anytime soon because the country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s status as a manufacturing juggernaut has vastly improved living standards, especially in rural areas.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153No other economy has had that kind of growth over that period of time,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Larry Thomas — Furniture Today, MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Calls for China to revalue its currency are misguided and would do little to help its trade imbalance with the United States, an expert on the Chinese economy told furniture finance executives here. Albert Keidel, a fellow at the Carnegie Institute and former Treasury Department official, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-indonesia-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}