Local govt debt soared after 2015, surpassing the combined revenues of local govts and profits of local SOEs, necessitating a central govt bailout, said the prominent economist at Tsinghua.
A very interesting article, I'm pleased to see this sort of study can be undertaken and published.
Besides debt which is relatively easy to find and measure, being related to currency of exchange, I'm always currious about deeper and more dangerous liabilities, those that can't be easily discovered and measured. For example polluted/toxic soils, these are naturally not transparent and often go unmeasured/undermeasured in the West, and I wonder how they are grappled with under a socialist system where in theory they are more likely a public liability than a private one.
I wonder why the WB and IMF estimate was much lower. That’s not really explained in the article.
A very interesting article, I'm pleased to see this sort of study can be undertaken and published.
Besides debt which is relatively easy to find and measure, being related to currency of exchange, I'm always currious about deeper and more dangerous liabilities, those that can't be easily discovered and measured. For example polluted/toxic soils, these are naturally not transparent and often go unmeasured/undermeasured in the West, and I wonder how they are grappled with under a socialist system where in theory they are more likely a public liability than a private one.
It's somewhere between naive and deliberately misleading to cover debt while ignoring the offsetting assets.
China's debt to asset ratio is around 4.2:1, incomparably better than any other sovereign borrower.
The 3 Gorges, for example, has a 150% annual ROI and the HSR returns 6%-8%...