China Chooses Growth Over Reform

The Wall Street Journal piece on rapid credit growth in China yesterday describes the sharp tradeoff for the Chinese government: achieving growth targets in the near term comes at the expense of reform delays and further rapid debt accumulation. With growth likely to decelerate in 2015 without additional stimulus, the prospects for meaningful economic reform are receding. I’ve explored this tradeoff in my July Global Economics Monthly (here). Imposing hard budget constraints, tightening credit, recognizing losses, and addressing massive excess capacity in real estate, raw materials and other sectors is disruptive in the short term, and as long as growth is falling short of government targets the hard decisions are likely to be deferred. If it takes a crisis to force change, I argue in the GEM that the smooth rebalancing scenarios that China optimists predict will be at risk.