Chinese economists zero in on crises
When the global recession hit in 2008, few nations were spared the devastating impact or lingering aftershocks, including the United States and China, the world’s top economic superpowers. Looking to better understand the crisis and help the Chinese government navigate its challenges, Liu He, M.P.A. ’95, a leading Beijing economist and policy adviser who now serves as minister of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, assembled a research team in 2010 to study the circumstances surrounding the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 2008 recession in the hope that the comparison might provide some guideposts. The resulting analysis, published jointly this month by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center, identifies a number of instructive similarities between the two crises, including large, nearly-identical income gaps between the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and everyone else in 1928 and 2007; populist, nationalist,...