China

Bill McRaith on building factories from 1990s China to present day Ethiopia, being pitched by governments, and the future of the apparel industry.

A national drug reimbursement reform in China, which traded price reductions for guaranteed patient access, dramatically expanded the country’s pharmaceutical innovation, offering a rare policy model that reconciles drug affordability with R&D incent...

New research quantifies how China's mass campaign to eradicate sparrows during the Great Leap Forward disrupted natural pest control, reduced crop yields, and contributed to millions of deaths during the Great Famine.

A government-endorsed supplemental insurance scheme in China expanded coverage for hundreds of millions of people, but also crowded out private insurance purchases, suggesting that enrolment growth alone overstates the true gains in risk protection.

New research on China shows that entrepreneurs who start multiple firms are more productive on average – but this conceals a troubling pattern: some succeed not because of skill, but because of preferential access to finance.

China's trillion-dollar lending boom to the developing world has followed the same boom-bust pattern as past sovereign debt cycles, leaving many low-income countries trapped in a silent debt crisis with little prospect of coordinated relief.

China’s solar subsidies triggered innovation and learning-by-doing that dramatically lowered global solar costs while generating domestic economic gains large enough to outweigh the subsidy costs, showing that green industrial policy can simultaneous...

Josh Lerner discusses why there is a gap between innovation and impact, and how policymakers can speed up technological diffusion.

China’s bureaucratic promotion system unintentionally incentivises local leaders to restrict trade and underinvest in cross-jurisdictional infrastructure with provincial peers, fragmenting the world’s largest domestic markets and undermining long-ter...