China’s Economic Growth 1978-2025: What We Know Today about China’s Economic Growth Tomorrow

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past real GDP growth rates into the future, the size of the Chinese economy surpasses that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms between 2012 and 2015; by 2025, China is likely to be the world's largest economic power by almost any measure. The extrapolations are supported by two types of considerations. First, China’s growth patterns of the past 25 years since the beginning of economic reforms match well those identified by standard economic development and trade theories (structural change, catching up, and factor price equalization). Second, decomposing China’s GDP growth into growth of labor and other variables, the near-certain information available today about the quantity and quality of Chinese laborers through 2015 and possibly several years after allows inferences about future GDP growth. Short of some cataclysmic event, and given a continuation of the generally sound economic policies of the past, demographics alone suggests China’s continued economic rise. If talent is randomly distributed in the world population and if agglomeration of talent is important, then the odds are strongly in China’s favor.economic growth, growth accounting, growth forecasts, development theories, human capital formation, education (all: China)

New Capital Estimates for China

Data on physical capital are an indispensable part of economic growth and efficiency studies. In the case of China, fixed asset time series are usually derived either by aggregating gross fixed capital formation data over time, net of depreciation, or by correcting the limited official fixed asset data available. These procedures, to varying degrees, ignore that (i) gross fixed capital formation does not equal investment, (ii) investment does not equal the value of fixed assets newly created through investment, (iii) depreciation is an accounting measure that has no impact on changes in the production capacity of fixed assets, (iv) official fixed asset data, where available, incorporate significant revaluations in the 1990s, and (v) the variable 'net fixed assets,' frequently used in the literature, is an inappropriate measure of fixed assets for the purpose of growth or efficiency studies. This paper derives economy-wide fixed asset values for 1954-2002, correcting for these shortcomings. It also uses the so far unexplored method of combining economy-wide depreciation data (in the income approach to the calculation of gross domestic product) with an economy-wide depreciation rate to directly yield economy-wide fixed assets. The fixed asset time series derived here are contrasted with each other as well as with those presented in the literature. The reliability of the different series is evaluated, leading to the recommendation of a specific choice of fixed asset time series.Capital, fixed assets, investment, national income accounting, production function estimations, measurement of economic growth, Chinese statistics

China’s Economic Growth 1978-2025: What We Know Today about China’s Economic Growth Tomorrow

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past real GDP growth rates into the future, the size of the Chinese economy surpasses that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms between 2012 and 2015; by 2025, China is likely to be the world's largest economic power by almost any measure. The extrapolations are supported by two types of considerations. First, China’s growth patterns of the past 25 years since the beginning of economic reforms match well those identified by standard economic development and trade theories (structural change, catching up, and factor price equalization). Second, decomposing China’s GDP growth into growth of labor and other variables, the near-certain information available today about the quantity and quality of Chinese laborers through 2015, if not several years after, allows inferences about future GDP growth. Short of some cataclysmic event, demographics alone suggests China’s continued economic rise. If talent is randomly distributed in the world population and if agglomeration of talent is important, then the odds are strongly in China’s favor.economic growth, growth accounting, growth forecasts, development theories, human capital formation, education (all: China)

New Capital Estimates for China

Data on physical capital are an indispensable part of economic growth and efficiency studies. In the case of China, economy-wide fixed asset series are usually derived by aggregating gross fixed capital formation (net of depreciation) over time, and sectoral/ownership-specific series by correcting the limited official fixed asset data available. These procedures, to varying degrees, ignore that (i) gross fixed capital formation does not equal investment, (ii) investment does not equal the value of fixed assets newly created through investment, (iii) depreciation is an accounting measure that bears no necessary relation to changes in the production capacity of fixed assets, (iv) official fixed asset data, where available, incorporate significant revaluations in the 1990s, and (v) “net fixed assets” do not measure the contribution of fixed assets to production. This paper derives economy-wide fixed asset values for 1953-2003, correcting for these shortcomings. It uses both the traditional, cumulative approach and a new, so far unexplored method of combining economy-wide depreciation values and an economy-wide depreciation rate to directly yield economy-wide fixed assets. The derived fixed asset time series are evaluated in a comparison with each other as well as with series in the literature, leading to the recommendation of a specific choice of fixed asset time series.Capital, investment, national income accounting, production function estimations, Chinese statistics, fixed assets, measurement of economic growth

Real-Time Statistical Speech Translation

This research investigates the Statistical Machine Translation approaches to translate speech in real time automatically. Such systems can be used in a pipeline with speech recognition and synthesis software in order to produce a real-time voice communication system between foreigners. We obtained three main data sets from spoken proceedings that represent three different types of human speech. TED, Europarl, and OPUS parallel text corpora were used as the basis for training of language models, for developmental tuning and testing of the translation system. We also conducted experiments involving part of speech tagging, compound splitting, linear language model interpolation, TrueCasing and morphosyntactic analysis. We evaluated the effects of variety of data preparations on the translation results using the BLEU, NIST, METEOR and TER metrics and tried to give answer which metric is most suitable for PL-EN language pair.Comment: machine translation, polish englis

Lensing and high-z supernova surveys

Gravitational lensing causes the distribution of observed brightnesses of standard candles at a given redshift to be highly non-gaussian. The distribution is strongly, and asymmetrically, peaked at a value less than the expected value in a homogeneous Robertson-Walker universe. Therefore, given any small sample of observations in an inhomogeneous universe, the most likely observed luminosity is at flux values less than the Robertson-Walker value. This paper explores the impact of this systematic error due to lensing upon surveys predicated on measuring standard candle brightnesses. We re-analyze recent results from the high-z supernova team (Riess et al. 1998), both when most of the matter in the universe is in the form of compact objects (represented by the empty-beam expression, corresponding to the maximal case of lensing), and when the matter is continuously distributed in galaxies. We find that the best-fit model remains unchanged (at Omega_m=0, Omega_Lambda=0.45), but the confidence contours change size and shape, becoming larger (and thus allowing a broader range of parameter space) and dropping towards higher values of matter density, Omega_m (or correspondingly, lower values of the cosmological constant, Omega_Lambda). These effects are slight when the matter is continuously distributed. However, the effects become considerably more important if most of the matter is in compact objects. For example, neglecting lensing, the Omega_m=0.5, Omega_Lambda=0.5 model is more than 2 sigma away from the best fit. In the empty-beam analysis, this cosmology is at 1 sigma.Comment: 11 pages, 3 ps figures. uses aaspp4.sty. accepted to ApJ Letters. includes analysis of lensing due to matter continuously distributed in galaxie

Using gravitational-wave standard sirens

Gravitational waves (GWs) from supermassive binary black hole (BBH) inspirals are potentially powerful standard sirens (the GW analog to standard candles) (Schutz 1986, 2002). Because these systems are well-modeled, the space-based GW observatory LISA will be able to measure the luminosity distance (but not the redshift) to some distant massive BBH systems with 1-10% accuracy. This accuracy is largely limited by pointing error: GW sources generally are poorly localized on the sky. Localizing the binary independently (e.g., through association with an electromagnetic counterpart) greatly reduces this positional error. An electromagnetic counterpart may also allow determination of the event's redshift. In this case, BBH coalescence would constitute an extremely precise (better than 1%) standard candle visible to high redshift. In practice, gravitational lensing degrades this precision, though the candle remains precise enough to provide useful information about the distance-redshift relation. Even if very rare, these GW standard sirens would complement, and increase confidence in, other standard candles.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. ApJ, in pres

Spatial Price Differences in China: Estimates and Implications

Prices differ across space: from province to province, from rural (or urban) areas in one province to rural (or urban) areas in another province, and from rural to urban areas within one province. Systematic differences in prices across a range of goods and services in different localities imply regional differences in the costs of living. If high- income provinces also have high costs of living, and low-income provinces have low costs of living, the use of nominal income measures in explaining such economic outcomes as inequality can lead to misinterpretations. Income should be adjusted for costs of living. We are interested in the sign and magnitude of the adjustments needed, their changes over time, and their impact on economic outcomes in China. In this article, we construct a set of (rural, urban, total) provincial- level spatial price deflators for the years 1984-2002 that can be used to obtain provincial-level income measures adjusted for purchasing power. We provide illustrations of the significant effect of ignoring spatial price differences in the analysis of China's economy.