Although China’s much-needed transition to a new growth path is proceeding broadly as expected, the transition is still fraught with uncertainty, including regarding the Chinese authorities’ ability to achieve a smooth rebalancing of growth and the extent of the attendant slowdown in activity. Thus, in the short run, the transition process is likely to entail significant spillovers through trade and commodities, and possibly financial channels. This note sheds some light on the size and nature of financial spillovers from China by looking at the impact of developments in China on global financial markets, with a particular emphasis on differentiation across asset classes and markets. The note shows that economic and financial developments in China have a significant impact on global financial markets, but these effects reflect primarily the central role the country plays in goods trade and commodity markets, rather than China’s financial integration in global markets and the direct financial linkages it has with other countries.

Until recently, China has been the leading contributor to global economic growth and—since the recent global financial crisis—a stabilizing driver of its evolution. However, as China recently began to rebalance its economy away from investment and exports and toward consumption, its GDP growth slowed significantly—partly reversing the country’s contribution to global output and trade growth—and is expected to continue to decline gradually over the medium term. There is little consensus regarding the consequences of a China’s growth slowdown for the rest of the world, with some arguing that a significant slowdown in China may have large implications and possibly lead to a worldwide recession if the “rebalancing” process is not well managed, and others suggesting that even a significant slowdown in China is unlikely to have large global effects, as its role in the world economy is still limited This note contributes to the ongoing debate by analyzing how growth shocks in China affect particular regions and country groups and how the impact and key transmission channels of these growth shocks have increased over time. It finds that historically, the average impact of growth shocks in China on global output has been statistically significant but limited, but since the early 2000s, the magnitude of spillovers has significantly increased. Trade linkages remain the main transmission channels, with larger effects for net commodity exporters and countries mostly exporting manufacturing goods. Also, spillover effects tend to be larger during periods of high global uncertainty and have been positively associated with an increase in the share of industry in total value in China, which suggests an important role of the “rebalancing” process.

China’s transition to a new growth model continues and the impact has been felt across the globe. Several trends contribute to the ‘maturing’ of China’s economy: i) structural slowing on the convergence path; ii) on-shoring deepening; and iii) demand rebalancing from investment towards consumption. In the short term, financial stress may lead to a cyclical slowdown. This paper discusses and quantifies spillovers to the global economy from these different developments. The analysis is undertaken using the APDMOD and G20MOD, both modules of the IMF’s Flexible System of Global Models. For plausible values of these developments, the overall impact on the global economy is not large. However, the impact on China’s closest trading partners and commodity exporters can be notable.

When the People's Republic of China (PRC) was granted Most Favored Nation (MFN) status by the United States in 1979, no one imagined the massive transformation the Chinese economy would make within a few decades. China's remarkable transition from merely being a "world factory," to the source of the world's new R&D and product design and innovation since the 1980s is the key focus of Spillover Effects of China Going Global. In this insightful and unique book, Joseph Pelzman shows how the second largest world economy triggered off many spillover effects beyond mass-labour production of durable and non-durable goods -- such as the provision of foreign aid to African, Latin American and Asian economies, and increasing focus on internal endogenous innovation, research and development. He provides a comprehensive look at these spillover effects and analyzes how they will undoubtedly bring positive opportunities for others within the rest of the world in the 21st Century.

We estimate the impact of distinct types of slowdowns in China on countries and firms globally. First, we combine a structural vector autoregression framework with a broad-based measure of domestic economic activity in China to distinguish supply versus demand components of Chinese growth. We then use local projection models to assess the responses to such shocks of GDP growth (revenue) in other countries (firms). We find that: (i) both supply and demand slowdowns are associated with substantial declines in partner GDP and firm revenue; (ii) negative spillovers are larger in countries and firms with stronger trade links with China; and (iii) spillovers from Chinese supply shocks are stronger than spillovers from demand shocks, both at the aggregate- and firm-level.

Although China’s much-needed transition to a new growth path is proceeding broadly as expected, the transition is still fraught with uncertainty, including regarding the Chinese authorities’ ability to achieve a smooth rebalancing of growth and the extent of the attendant slowdown in activity. Thus, in the short run, the transition process is likely to entail significant spillovers through trade and commodities, and possibly financial channels. This note sheds some light on the size and nature of financial spillovers from China by looking at the impact of developments in China on global financial markets, with a particular emphasis on differentiation across asset classes and markets. The note shows that economic and financial developments in China have a significant impact on global financial markets, but these effects reflect primarily the central role the country plays in goods trade and commodity markets, rather than China’s financial integration in global markets and the direct financial linkages it has with other countries.

Using a panel vector autoregression and a novel measure of export-intensity-adjusted final demand, this note studies spillovers from China’s economic transition on export growth in 46 advanced and emerging market economies. The analysis suggests that a 1 percentage point shock to China’s final demand growth reduces the average country’s export growth by 0.1–0.2 percentage point. The impact is largest in Emerging Asia, where an export-growth-accounting exercise suggests that China’s economic transition has reduced average export growth rates by 1 percentage point since early 2014. Other countries linked to China’s manufacturing sector, as well as commodity exporters, are also significantly affected. This suggests that trading partners need to adjust to an environment of weaker external demand as China completes its transition to a more sustainable growth model.