Rebalancing China's Growth

This chapter examines China’s economic imbalance and the need for rebalancing. China’s international payments surpluses during the first decade of the twenty-first century have been accompanied by deepening domestic structural risks to economic growth and development. These structural risks include the composition of growth resulting from China’s dynamic internal transformation; the overcapacity in a number of industries, the real estate bubbles, the local government debts, and associated financial strains; China’s high export dependence; the trajectory and intensity of resource use and CO2 emissions; welfare problems of distribution; and international market constraints. China must confront these challenges through deepened reform in order to put its growth path onto a more sustainable trajectory in the future. However, addressing economic imbalances and sustaining growth against a backdrop of heightened domestic and international uncertainty remains a huge challenge.