Open QuestionsWhy US economist Nicholas Lardy thinks the ‘peak China’ theory has peaked
The veteran China watcher talks Beijing’s need for financial reform and how US-China economic convergence could still be on the horizon
Nicholas Lardy is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, both Washington-based think tanks. He has studied the Chinese economy extensively, publishing several books on its growth and development since the late 1970s. His most recent, 2019’s The State Strikes Back, posits a rollback of Beijing’s economic reforms via renewed government intervention into the market.
No, I think the answer is no. Manufacturing jobs in the US as a share of total employment have been shrinking for about 70 or 80 years. The manufacturing share of output has not gone down as much, because productivity per worker has gone up. But the idea that we’re going to restore manufacturing jobs to any significant degree, I think, is very unlikely.