Chinese Economy - a Bubble?

(Fall 2017) Nowadays China is growing at rapid clip, averaging 10 percent growth per year. According to the World Bank, China is "the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” The  United Nations classifies China as a developing country, but as Quartz reporting highlights, the official definition is...not exactly defined, officially.

• The two indicators commonly referenced to distinguish developed countries from developing countries are GDP per capita and the Human Development Index (HDI), with $25,000 the cutoff for GDP per capita and 0.88 the average HDI among developed countries.
  
• Today many speculate that the Chinese economy is a bubble, pointing to debt and the cost of bad assets. In the fourth quarter of 2016, the total debt of China exceeded the debt of the US by more than 250 percent.
• Whereas government debt is comparable with other countries, corporate and household debt of China has risen sharply. And this is the reason to worry.

China's economic performance collapsed after the Great Recession of 2008. Demand for Chinese exports took the wind out of the economy. The slowdown in exports influenced not only production volume but also employment; the government said that more than 20 million migrants lost their jobs.

• In addition, manufacturing PMI, an indicator of the level of economic health of the manufacturing sector, hit the lowest level in years.
• According to Yu Bin, head of the micro economy research department at the State Council’s Development Research Centre, stable economic growth depends on a high-level of infrastructure investment. That's why following the 2008 crisis, infrastructure investment jumped by more than 50 percent in China. As a result, though, loans increased, too.

So, let’s look at the Chinese economy now. As the second-largest economy in the world and the world's trade engine, a shock in China today is likely to have a similar economic shock as did the US housing credit bubble in 2008. 

• Chinese companies are facing a decreased ability to pay. The number of healthy companies* fell by more than 30 percent between 20017 and 2016, from 577 companies to 845. 
• In 2016, Fortune reported that China’s biggest banks lost more than ¥270 billion from writing off bad debts. In 2017, this figure has continued to grow. 
• Explore these figures and more in our dashboard below.

*Ratio is estimated based on net debt to EBITDA ratio.