China boom argument ignores the golden rule

scmp ^ | JAKE VAN DER KAMP

[Hootowl]

Actually, China is already on a crash course, the effects of which will be seen in the next few decades, and that's its one-child population policy. In 20-40 years, China is going to have a HUGE surplus of aging couples, each of which has only one child between them for support. Economic implosion follows.

[TaiwanSemiconductor]

China's one-child policy was never universally implemented. In the last 20 years (which is the period the policy has been in effect), China's population rose from 1 bil. to 1.3 bil., or 300 mil. new people. When a country's population is still growing, it means that more than 2 offspring per family are being produced. In China's case, it's about 2.1 or so.

[TaiwanSemiconductor]

All the E. Asian tigers have had "crony capitalism" and sick banking systems. Japan's got the world's sickest banking system. In general, doing business in Asia is a lot shadier than doing business in America. This is true to this day in places like Taiwan and S. Korea.

But the banking systems in today's Third World republics (Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, etc.) are just as corrupt. This is why most of these Third World republics have required IMF bailouts. In the last years, Brazil and Turkey were the latest to get bailouts.

E. Asian banking systems may not be perfect, but because authoritarian E. Asian countries still had the advantage of not having to deal with parliamentary gridlock, they could still pass economic reforms and develop their economies, despite having imperfect banking systems.

[dennisw]

super bump!!!!

[TaiwanSemiconductor]

In general, China's got all the advantages the E. Asian "tigers" had PLUS one huge advantage they never had -- which is that China represents a huge market in itself. Whereas all these other places like Taiwan, Korea, Singapore etc. get most of their GDP from exports, China only gets 20% from exports and gets most of its GDP from its own domestic market. Taiwan or S. Korea could never be the #2 market for PC's due to their limited domestic markets, but China today is already #2. So China has the best of both worlds -- a huge domestic market plus exports. In other words, the market that China most resembles is America itself.

[NP-INCOMPLETE]

Just one problem, its banking system. The system is running such a huge deficit to keep the soe's afloat that its liable to collapse before industrialization completes in that country.