Word: china
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Looking to the West Are such huge projects really necessary? China, with its gleaming coastal cities and modern transport hubs, is already the envy of developing countries like India. And from Alaska to Japan, there are plenty of examples around the world of infrastructure projects that owed more to local politicking than to real economic need. Most of China's stimulus spending, critics note, will be supervised by local governments. This will undoubtedly mean that some money will end up lining the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats...
...there are early signs that the massive influx of government spending is already accomplishing its main goal: easing China's economic slowdown, which has been headlined by double-digit declines in exports, thousands of factory closures and the layoff of about 20 million workers. Economic statistics for the first quarter of 2009 were surprisingly positive, leading some economists to conclude that the rate of contraction was slowing and that China might be on the road to recovery. Power-generation and transportation statistics, key indicators of the economy's direction, registered modest increases in March after months of decline. Banks lent...
...China, of course, has certain advantages when it comes to managing shifting economic winds. There's no peskily powerful Congress to worry about, for one thing; what the Chinese government wants in the way of policy, it gets. Christopher Wood, chief Asia strategist for the brokerage and investment firm CLSA, says the fact that China's economy is a hybrid of capitalism and a socialist command economy has given the government much greater flexibility to intervene. Beijing more or less ordered Chinese banks to increase lending in response to the global financial meltdown. Wood, a former journalist well known...
...recovery to last beyond the end of the year, China's crucial manufacturing and export sector must revive. Otherwise, Wood says, stimulus spending could result in a "skewed outcome": billions of dollars in loans made to artificially boost growth could start to go bad, dragging down China's banks; at the same time, the country would remain saddled with a glut of factories producing a vast surplus of goods no one wants...
While the stimulus package has risks, it also affords China a chance to rebalance the country's growing wealth. One by-product of China's prolonged expansion is that coastal regions - marked by boomtowns such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Tianjin as well as their hinterlands - have grown much faster than the country's interior provinces, which have always been poorer. For years the central government has tried various policies to lift western China, without much result. The infrastructure push gives Beijing another chance to address divisive and potentially explosive wealth gaps that have grown between east and west, rich...