Speaker:

Professor Albert Keidel
Adjunct Professor, George Washington University, USA

Date & Time:

Friday, 9 December 2022
9:00 am – 10:30 am

Video recording:

Please visit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie09l5Rmz6M for a video recording of the seminar. Alternatively, please visit https://www.youtube.com/EastAsianInstituteNUS.

Abstract:

The speaker’s research findings show that China’s economy under Xi Jinping exhibits core continuities with past Chinese policies and trends. The key elements of this steadiness offer lessons for other developing countries as they seek more rapid modernisation, meaningful poverty reduction and, ultimately, convergence with the developed world. These are important dimensions of China’s overall economic challenge to the world. China’s overall economic consistency also provides a guide to economic likelihoods in Xi Jinping’s third term and for the remainder of the decade, if not beyond. China’s policy continuity is different from uniformity, however. It includes timely practical reactions to both expected and unexpected developments. These reactions to new situations often result in significant shifts in operational patterns and statistical outcomes. These shifts, however, remain true to the overriding policy imperative of previous decades: insistence on adjusting decisions to meet actual and anticipated circumstances. The speaker will sketch out the principal dimensions of China’s economic continuity by drawing on examples and trends over more than 40 years and by noting how they link to current developments and their potential outcomes.

About the Speaker:

Albert Keidel is adjunct professor at George Washington University, where he teaches China’s modern economy. His most recent book is China’s Economic Challenge: Unconventional Success (2022, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company). He has previously published broadly on China’s economy, including on its statistical system, poverty alleviation programmes, financial sector, exchange rate controversies, macroeconomic cycles and prospects into the 21st century. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he authored a monograph on how China’s cyclical economy affected the rural sector. His earlier book on South Korea’s regional rural development is based on his 1970s dissertation fieldwork. Prof Keidel served in the US Treasury Department as China Desk and acting director of the Office of East Asian Nations. He served in Beijing for three years as a World Bank contract employee, covering macroeconomic trends, statistical system reforms, poverty programmes, local fiscal health and reform of the state enterprise system. He previously managed his own research firm focused on China’s economy and served eight years as field supervisor for the United Nations Development Programme on the first multilateral development loan programme in China, emphasising on northeast China’s animal husbandry and related light manufacturing. He has a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University, a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, and was a post-doctoral fellow, with Japanese grant support, in the (Japanese-Language) Economics Faculty at Tokyo National University. He uses written and spoken Mandarin Chinese professionally.