China’s growth potential has become a hotly debated topic as the economy has reached an income level susceptible to the “middle-income trap” and financial vulnerabilities are mounting after years of rapid credit expansion. However, the existing literature has largely focused on macro level aggregates, which are ill suited to understanding China’s significant structural transformation and its impact on economic growth. To fill the gap, this paper takes a deep dive into China’s convergence progress in 38 industrial sectors and 11 services sectors, examines past sectoral transitions, and predicts future shifts. We find that China’s productivity convergence remains at an early stage, with the industrial sector more advanced than services. Large variations exist among subsectors, with high-tech industrial sectors, in particular the ICT sector, lagging low-tech sectors. Going forward, ample room remains for further convergence, but the shrinking distance to the frontier, the structural shift from industry to services, and demographic changes will put sustained downward pressure on growth, which could slow to 5 percent by 2025 and 4 percent by 2030. Digitalization, SOE reform, and services sector opening up could be three major forces boosting future growth, while the risks of a financial crisis and a reversal in global integration in trade and technology could slow the pace of convergence.

Existing explanations of China's dramatic economic growth since 1978 have neglected a key piece of the China Puzzle, that is, China since 1978 has been a typical “East Asian Developmental State (EADS)” with a long socialist legacy that regularly deploys industrial and science & technology (S&T) policies to “create winners” in key industries. Combining an original dataset on China's industrial policy and S&T policy with an original dataset on performance of Chinese firms, we demonstrate that China's industrial and S&T policies indeed succeeded in “creating winners” in certain industries with. Moreover, whether the state can succeed in “creating winners” critically depends on the nature of an industry. When an industry is an emerging one with rapid pace of technological change, China's industrial and S&T policies have indeed led to rapid productivity growth and by implication, significant technological catch-up in the industry. In contrast, when an industry is a fairly mature one with only slow pace of technological change, China's industrial and S&T policies have had little effect on productivity growth. By providing the EADS model with positive econometric evidence for the first time, our study also yields critical policy implications for medium to large developing countries to craft their industrial and S&T policies.

China’s efforts in searching for new sources of growth are increasingly pressing given the persistence of the growth slowdown in recent years. This year’s book elucidates key present macroeconomic challenges facing China’s economy in 2017, and the impacts and readiness of human capital, innovation and technological change in affecting the development of China’s economy. The book explores the development of human capital as the foundations of China’s push into more advanced growth frontiers. It also explores the progress of productivity improvement in becoming the primary mechanism by which China can sustain economic growth, and explains the importance of China’s human capital investments to success on this front. The book demonstrates that technical change is a major contributor to productivity growth; and that invention and innovation are increasingly driving technical change but so far lumpily across regions, sectors and invention motivations. Included are chapters providing an update on reform and macroeconomic development, educational inequality, the role of intangibles in determining China’s economic growth, and China’s progress in transitioning towards being an innovative country. The book also covers the regional dimension of innovation and technological progress by sector: in agricultural productivity, renewable energy and financial markets. Chapters on trade, investment, regional cooperation and foreign aid explore further the mechanisms through which technological change and innovative activities are emerging locally and internationally.