Why Be Normal? Can China’s Economy Be Guided to Slower But Stable Growth?

Two leading economists on China will launch this year’s China Program Winter Colloquia Series, China's New Normal, by examining the slower growth and its implications.  Barry Naughton proactively asks “why be normal”.  Is slower growth what the economy needs to be stabilized?.  Scott Rozelle asks whether there is a hidden demographic disaster that accentuate existing human capital inequality that derail a soft landing.

Barry Naughton is an economist and Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, at the University of California, San Diego.  Naughton has published extensively on the Chinese economy, with a focus on four interrelated areas: market transition; industry and technology; foreign trade; and Chinese political economy. His pioneering study of Chinese economic reform, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. Dr. Naughton’s comprehensive survey, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, was published by MIT Press in 2007, and his most recent book (co-edited with Kellee Tsai), State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation and the Chinese Miracle, has just appeared from Cambridge University Press (2015). Naughton also publishes regular quarterly analyses of China’s economic policy-making online at China Leadership Monitor. Dr. Naughton received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1986, and is a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Rural Education Action Program in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agriculture; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition. In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.

This event is off the record.