Controlling government debt seems to be one of the top priorities for current Chinese leaders since debt expansion and accumulation has reached an alarming level in recent years. However, this paper shows that serious contradictions exist between policy statements and revealed preferences of...

China's centralized political system has tried to adapt to alien decentralized markets in the past few decades, and the economic role of government is at the centre of the adaptation. This paper compares the economic role of Chinese government now to that in the early 1990s, and finds that the...

This paper reviews the changing role of government in China's economic development during the last four decades. It argues that China's outstanding economic performance has been largely caused by draining three “quake lakes” created by the command economy, thus releasing a huge potential...

In managed floats, central banks often intervene in the foreign exchange market to obtain politically desirable exchange rates. How this is done has remained totally opaque although central banks are likely to adopt a satisfying rather than optimizing strategy since they need to intervene...