1/15 This interesting essay by Oliver Kim on Chinese underconsumption was set off by a recent C40 Policy brief that argues, in the words of its title, that "China's consumption is not nearly as low as it appears." www.global-developments.org/p/does-china...
Thank you. Very interesting and informative.
2/15 The C40 essay illustrates some of the confusion that surrounds the issue of Chinese underconsumption. It argues that the Chinese don't underconsume because when corrected for prices or for income, Chinese consumption is more or less "normal". www.pekingnology.com/p/chinas-con...
3/15 This misses the point. What matters in the macro context is not the absolute level of consumption but rather the gap between consumption and production. This gap must be balanced either via the trade account of via investment (or both).
4/15 If Chinese consumption levels were truly "normal", than one or both of two other things must be true: either Chinese investment is "normal", or if it is higher than normal, China must be running a trade deficit. After all, Net exports = GDP - Consumption - Investment.
5/15 In fact China has the highest investment share in history as well as the highest trade surplus in history. There are only two ways this can happen. One way, of course, is for Chinese consumption to comprise a very low share of GDP.
6/15 But there is another way, to which Kim refers in his essay. It may be real GDP is much lower than reported GDP. If it is true that a significant share of investment is wasted, but that this waste isn't accounted for in the GDP data, mainly because investment losses...
7/15 are capitalized rather than expensed, this means, among other things, that GDP growth has been systematically overstated every year by the amount of capitalized investment losses, as I explain in a recent essay. carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/0...
8/15 Kim notes that this is one obvious way to resolve the "underconsumption" problem: "Chinese underconsumption is possibly the product of undercounting consumption and overestimating GDP." Yes, except that consumption is only undercounted to the extent GDP is overstated. It's the same thing.
9/15 To put this in simpler terms, there are two very different ways in which we can express China's demand imbalance, but these are just different ways of expressing the same problem of excess capacity—and require the same set of solutions.
10/15 One one hand, if China's reported GDP is an accurate measure of the value of goods and services produced by the Chinese economy (i.e. comparable to other economies' GDP), then it is true that the Chinese consume far too little of what they produce. This is just arithmetic.
11/15 If, on the other hand, Chinese consumption is "normal" in real terms, then either China is running a huge trade deficit (it clearly isn't), or the value of Chinese investment must be overstated, which in turn means that China's GDP is overstated.
Kind of hard to believe that you get this great type of analysis for free multiple times a week. Thanks Michael!