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Volume V, Issue 3, March 2016
A year ago this month, the Simon Chair asked whether China’s economic policymakers had the right stuff to navigate a needed transition to a new model of economic growth, one driven by consumption and services rather than investment and exports. Despite the intrinsic difficulty of the challenge and core tensions in China’s political economy, our answer was a qualified yes. President Xi Jinping had spent his first years in office consolidating the country’s policymaking apparatus and launching an ambitious program of reforms at the Communist Party’s Third Plenum. After a tumultuous year, our confidence in the capacity of Chinese economic decisionmakers to do what is needed to achieve sustainable growth is diminished. Our main concern is not policymaking competence, but the commitment of Beijing’s political leadership to market-based reform.
