1、NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES PEAK CHINA HOUSING Kenneth S. Rogoff Yuanchen Yang Working Paper 27697 http:/www.nber.org/papers/w27697 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 August 2020 The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily
2、reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. 2020 by Kenneth S. Rogoff
3、and Yuanchen Yang. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including notice, is given to the source. Peak China Housing Kenneth S. Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang NBER Working Paper No. 27697 August 2020
4、 JEL No. F39,G01,R3 ABSTRACT Chinas real estate has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the Covid-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to severe price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjust
5、ment both necessary and inevitable. We make use of newly available and updated data sources to analyze supply-demand conditions in the fast-moving Chinese economy. The imbalances are then compared to benchmarks from other economies. We conclude that the sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggr
6、egate growth shock, such as Covid-19 might pose. In our baseline calibration, using input-output tables and taking account of the very large footprint of housing construction and real-estate related sectors, the adjustment to a decline in housing activity can easily trim a cumulative 5-10 percent fr