For subscribers
China needs major reforms to avoid ‘Japanification’
The parallels with Japan in the 1990s are stunning, but China has advantages that reforms can help realise.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
One of the biggest impediments to China’s economic growth is its property market crisis, which is at least as serious as was Japan’s during the 1990s.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Follow topic:
As the third plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China approaches in July, the country’s top economic policymakers have their challenges cut out. One of them is to prevent China’s economy from sliding into the Japanese malaise of the 1990s.
In a recent interview, Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff told me that when he served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2001 to 2003, every Chinese economic official he met would tell him: “We are not going to become like Japan. We will never let that happen to us.”
