LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | China's Growth Prospects and Implications for Southeast Asia

Speaker: Wing Thye Woo, Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis

 

With the G-7 economies in the doldrums since 2008, the roller coastal behavior of global commodity markets in the 2010-2015 period is convincing testimony of the huge impact that China’s economy now has on the prosperity of many countries, especially those in Southeast Asia. The future course of the Chinese economy will determine, among other things, the legitimacy of the government, the incentive to project force beyond its borders, and the ability to build an effective international coalition to advance its agenda in world affairs. Professor Woo’s talk will (1) examine the recent marked slowdown in China’s growth to delineate the influence of temporary factors from that of the medium-term trend; (2) evaluate the policy options; and (3) discuss the domestic and external implications from the interaction between two scenarios of Chinese growth and two Southeast Asian settings.

 

Wing Thye Woo is President of Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia at Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur; Professor of Economics at University of California, Davis; and Professor, Institute of Population and Labour Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. He specializes in the East Asian economies, particularly China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. He is the Convener of the Asian Economic Panel (AEP), a network of leading scholars on Asian economies who meet tri-annually; and the Editor-in-Chief of the AEP journal, “Asian Economic Papers,” MIT Press. He was Special Advisor to US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in 1997-1998, and to Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia in 2005-2008. Wing has also advised a number of other governments on economic management, focusing on comprehensive tax reform (“Fiscal Management and Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China, Oxford University Press, 1995”); transition from centrally planning to market economies (“Economies in Transition: Comparing Asia and Europe,” MIT Press, 1997); handling of financial crisis (“The Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons for a Resilient Asia,” MIT Press, 2000); improving the livability of cities (“Ranking the Liveability of the Major Cities in the World,” World Scientific, 2012); and redesigning the international financial architecture (“A New Global Reserve System for a Transformed Global Economy, and Designing the Asian Component,” MIT Press, forthcoming).