China: the wild card of 2024?
In this commentary, George Magnus discusses various challenges facing China in 2024:
- Systemic problems, such as the real estate market downturn, overcapacity in several sectors, and weak social expectations, have become features of China’s economy. In addition, stalled productivity growth, rapid aging, high youth unemployment, and inequality are new structural issues China faces.
- The party is expected to adopt a 5% GDP growth target again and the economy is becoming more unbalanced.
- The government is not expected to implement significant macroeconomic stimulus and reforms, with monetary and credit policies remaining “prudent.”
Faced with an array of domestic economic problems, China should ideally substitute market and structural reforms for the more familiar strategy of doubling down on already high manufacturing investment and exports. But it won’t. As a result, the economy will become still more unbalanced. This policy focus will trigger a new round of trade war as China’s industrialisation and export push forces the US and Europe to import more Chinese products and de-industrialise. […] The US, EU, and other industrial countries will not go meekly to another de-industrialisation graveyard in this way.
China’s many systemic problems dominate its outlook for 2024
By: George Magnus – China Centre, Oxford University
The developing world’s sovereign debt crisis
In this commentary, Kaushik Basu highlights the sovereign debt crisis unfolding across the developing world as a major threat, and emphasizes the need for immediate international intervention to prevent it from escalating:
According to the World Bank’s latest International Debt Report, the world’s poorest countries have been hardest hit by the sovereign debt crisis. Their external debt service, which reached an all-time high of $88.9 billion in 2022, is projected to surge by 40% in 2023-24. Ghana and Zambia have already defaulted, Ethiopia will likely default by 2024, and domestic debt levels in countries like Argentina and Pakistan are alarmingly high.
The Biggest Threats to Global Economic Stability
By: Kaushik Basu – Cornell University
A year of elections
In 2024, over 40 countries are set to hold national elections, with significant implications for domestic and global politics. The rise of nationalism in Europe, the Americas, and South and Southeast Asia has heightened the potential impact of these electoral outcomes. Examples of recent radical populist successes in Argentina, the Netherlands, and India are cited, underscoring the increasing unpredictability of election results.
Taiwan, which holds a general election in January under the very “watchful” eye of mainland China; Indonesia, a country of 275 million people, which votes for a new President the following month; South Africa, where a third of the country is unemployed and crime rates are soaring; and India where general elections are being held between April and May in an atmosphere of increasing polarisation.
Cox also emphasizes the critical and unpredictable nature of the United States presidential election in November and before that the June elections that will decide the composition of the new European Parliament. The unprecedented number of elections make 2024 a year of particular significance in shaping the global political landscape.
Elections in 2024 make it the year of living dangerously
By: Michael Cox – LSE
