4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
The Great Crash of 2008 and China
Ross Garnaut, Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, former Australian Ambassador to China
Moderated by Hugh Patrick, R.D. Calkins Professor of International Business Emeritus, Columbia Business School; Co-Director, APEC Study Center
Monday, October 26, 4:30 – 6:00pm (reception to follow)
918 International Affairs Building
Co-sponsored by the Center on Japanese Economy and Business, APEC Study Center and Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Professor Garnaut spoke about the effect of the 2008 economic crisis on China and its response to it. He addressed China’s economic position leading up to the crisis, the country’s subsequent response to the crisis, and its long-term implications for China and the global political economy.
Addressing China’s economic situation, Professor Garnaut argued that China’s role in global imbalances fostered the boom of recent years in the “Anglosphere,” a term he uses which roughly encompasses the major English-speaking industrial powers of the world. Garnaut believes that the most recent economic downturn took China by surprise; as late as August 2008, the People’s Bank was still contracting the money supply in reaction to inflation. However, between late September and early October, the manufacturing export business came to a standstill as factories laid off thousands of workers due to a near-total dropoff in international orders. Although China’s banks were spared much of the devastation that Wall Street and London experienced, the government quickly implemented a massive fiscal stimulus, including a huge monetary expansion.
Professor Garnaut believes
that in the future the world will no longer have the same mechanisms of
transferring wealth from East Asia to the Anglosphere. Instead, within the next 10-30 years, he
envisions the development of a quadri-polar world between China, India, the EU,
and the U.S.
To download or listen to the audio of this event, please click here.
For more information please e-mail Andy Wanning.
Professor Patrick is recognized as a leading specialist on the Japanese economy and on Pacific Basin economic relations. His major fields of published research on Japan, which include 15 books and some 60 articles and essays, are macroeconomic performance and policy, banking and financial markets, government-business relations and Japan–United States economic relations. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and the Ohira Prize, and he has been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University, University of Tokyo and University of Bombay. Patrick, who joined the Columbia faculty after some years as professor of economics and director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, is also codirector of Columbia’s APEC Study Center.