All economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most. Add a secretive government, a controlled press and the sheer size of the country, and it’s harder to figure out what’s really happening in China than it is in any other major economy.


Start with the data, unreliable as they may be. What immediately jumps out at you when you compare China with almost any other economy, aside from its rapid growth, is the lopsided balance between consumption and investment. All successful economies devote part of their current income to investment rather than consumption, so as to expand their future ability to consume. China, however, seems to invest only to expand its future ability to invest even more. America, admittedly on the high side, devotes 70 percent of its gross domestic product to consumption; for China, the number is only half that high, while almost half of GDP is invested.


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And the answer, increasingly, seems to be no. The need for rebalancing has been obvious for years, but China just kept putting off the necessary changes, instead boosting the economy by keeping the currency undervalued and flooding it with cheap credit. (Since someone is going to raise this issue: No, this bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s policies here.) These measures postponed the day of reckoning but also ensured that this day would be even harder when it finally came. And now it has arrived.




© , New York Times News Service

Paul Krugman is a regular columnist for The New York Times.