Abstract
East and Southeast Asia, with nearly a third of the world’s population, has over the past half-century become the most rapidly growing region in the world. With the exception of the Philippines and Myanmar, all of the economies in the region have experienced at least one decade — and often several decades — of per capita GDP growth rates of 5 per cent a year and more. No other major part of the developing world has experienced anything comparable — whether it is South Asia (despite the recent high growth of India) or Sub-Saharan Africa, or most of Latin America. China’s high growth of the past three plus decades is extraordinary in the broader developing country context but is not unique in the East Asian context. Other economies, notably the Republic of Korea (1963–97) and Taiwan (1961–97), have grown somewhat longer at rates of 5 per cent per capita or more a year. Korea and Taiwan did not grow as rapidly as China during their high growth period, but Japan grew just as rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s although only for two not three plus decades (Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1). China’s experience is unique, however, in one respect in that it grew at a very fast 9 per cent rate for a long period starting from a lower per capita income than the other fast developers (Figure 2.2).
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Notes
Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins and Kwanho Shin (2012), From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
We still do not have a completely reliable measure of per capita GDP for China in purchasing power parity terms. The most systematic effort to estimate PPP for China was carried out by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank (Asian Development Bank, 2007, Purchasing Power Parities and Real Expenditures (Manila: Asian Development Bank)) but used only urban data in China to derive its purchasing power parity prices and this is widely believed to bias downward the resulting per capita GDP purchasing power parity estimates. However, even deriving per capita GDP using the official exchange rate China’s per capita GDP in 2011 was $5,100 and if one accepts the widely held view that the official Chinese exchange rate is undervalued by perhaps 25 per cent, then the per capita figure becomes $6,700. In developing countries the purchasing power parity per capita GDP is almost always higher, often considerably higher than the official exchange rate calculation mainly because the price of non-tradables (notably services) is much lower relative to tradables in developing countries. Thus a purchasing power parity figure of $8,000 is probably a conservative estimate of 2011 PPP per capita GDP in China.
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© 2012 International Economic Association
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Perkins, D.H. (2012). China’s Investment and GDP Growth Boom: When and How will it End?. In: Aoki, M., Wu, J. (eds) The Chinese Economy. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034298_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034298_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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