China-US Track II Dialogues on Track
May 12-2020
Communications and concerted efforts are ever more crucial in time of pandemic. Laudably, the Sino-US Economic Track II Dialogues continued its decade-long traditions by holding an online session on April 29th.
Founded by the NSD and the National Committee on US-China Relations in 2010, the Track II Dialogues facilitates academic exchanges between economists of the two countries and the resulting policy inputs are presented to their respective government.
The first dialogue this year focused on the short, medium and long-term impacts of the pandemic on Chinese and US economies. Mr. Steve Orlins, Chairman of NCUCR, hosted the dialogue. Prof. Huang Yiping, Deputy Dean of the NSD, and Dr. Gao Shanwen, Chief Economist of Essence Securities represented the Chinese side, and their American counterparts were Dr. Catherine Mann, Global Chief Economist of Citigroup, and Dr. Mark M. Zandi, Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics. They were joined by an audience of several hundred business and media representatives.
Prof. Huang pointed out that in the short term, stimulus policies should till towards propping up households and small and micro-enterprises to preserve their vitality for future growth. In the mid-term, the economy cannot be expected to pull off a recovery as fast as the post-SARS one. A silver lining is that within one or two years, the global retail industry might welcome in new opportunities; in particular, the Chinese retail and digital economy offers much optimism. In the long run, though, the international environment is to get more complex, and central banks the world over are highly likely to continue radical monetary expansion for some more time.
Dr. Catherine Mann said that the current crisis was the worst since the Great Depression. She argued that the manufacturing sector might have a V-shaped recovery, but the service industry could be L-shaped due to less consumption for health reasons and social distancing measures. Stimulus policies, she noted, might be unsustainable given the lengthy duration of the pandemic. What especially worried Dr. Mark M. Zandi was that a locomotive country might not be in place to pull global economic recovery. Dr. Gao Shanwen said that compared with the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic had four times as high of negative impact on China’s GDP growth and two times as high on industrial output in the first quarter of 2020.
