China's Changing Financial System: Can It Catch Up With, or Even Drive Growth

Throughout the past three decades of fast growth, China has undergone tremendous structural changes in its economy. There has been significant and continuing industrialization, urbanization and integration into the world economy. The financial system has also undergone major changes, with the People's Bank of China (PBOC) ending its monopoly of the banking sector and being recast as the nation's central bank in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The purpose of this paper is to examine in some detail China's changing financial system so as to assess whether it can catch up with, or even drive economic growth.