Author: David Dollar
A few weeks ago I had the unique opportunity to camp out on top of the Great Wall, which was a fitting exclamation mark at the end of my five years as the World Bank’s China Country Director.
It was a cloudy, drizzly day as we started, but then cleared up and turned into a lovely evening. The large group of kids we had with us slept in one of the guard towers along the wall, but I and a few others opted to sleep under the stars. The next morning opened with some mist, but then turned into a spectacular blue day. Some long-term Beijing residents hiking with us noted that they couldn’t recall ever seeing the countryside so green.
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Author: David Dollar
At the height of the recent boom the U.S. household savings rate dropped to zero: the average American family saved nothing from its annual income of more than $38,000 per person. In China, by contrast, poor rural families earning less than $200 per person save 18 percent of their meager income. This is one of the striking findings of the World Bank poverty assessment released today.
The poverty study uses a wealth of household survey and village-level data to tell a fascinating story of progress and vulnerability. The progress is remarkable: the share of the population living below the World Bank’s consumption poverty line for China declined from 65 percent at the beginning of economic reform (1981) to 4 percent in 2007. The pace of poverty reduction varied over these 26 years. One of the periods of most rapid poverty reduction has been the boom time since China joined the World Trade Organization. Poverty declined from 16 percent in 2001 to 4 percent in just six years.
This is an extract from the East Asia and Pacific on the Rise blog. To read the rest of the article, click here.
Author: David Dollar, World Bank
What to make of it when, within a few hours last week, the statistical bureau depressed us with a 26 per cent decline in exports for February and then elated us with a 27 per cent increase in urban fixed asset investment? These two figures capture nicely the struggle that is going on within the Chinese economy.
We launched our China Quarterly report today with our take on how to reconcile the conflicting data. Clearly, the global economy is in very poor shape. Global GDP declined at an annualized rate of 5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and global industrial production declined at a 20 per cent rate. These are shocking numbers that those of us born after the 1930s have never seen. Naturally this has had a large effect on China, which is an open, export-oriented economy. China’s seasonally adjusted monthly exports peaked at around $120 billion last fall, and then fell off a cliff – dropping by about one-third (see chart).
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