For nearly a decade there has been almost unanimous consensus among economists and even senior Communist party officials that China needs to transform what Beijing calls its “unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable” growth model.
The simple prescription for what ails the world’s second-largest economy has been a big dose of household consumption and a cutback on its supposedly unhealthy penchant for investment.
Household consumption makes up only 35 per cent of China’s overall gross domestic product, around half the level of developed countries such as the US, while investment accounts for about half of GDP, an extraordinarily high level even for developing countries.