The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) recently published a research paper titled Human Capital and China’s Future Growth in its January 2017 issue. The organization first named in the paper is the China Enterprises Research Center in the Institute of Quality Development Strategy of WHU, and Prof. Li Hongbin is its first editor. 

Li Hongbin and his research team found that factors including demographic dividend and economic transition have contributed to the annual growth rate of 9.3% in the Chinese economy since the ‘reform & opening-up’ policy. Owing to the labor shift from agriculture characterized by low productivity to non-agriculture with high productivity and the transformation from planned economy to market economy, the Chinese economy has made miraculous progress, admired by the whole world. However, with the development of the Chinese economy, the situation is also becoming more complex: the aging population is becoming increasingly notable while the impetus to reform is declining. It was mentioned that the prospective growth rate of the Chinese economy will be between 3-4%, without the influence of accelerated accumulation of human capital.

The Journal of Economic Perspectives, published by the American Economic Association, is an authoritative academic periodical, whose purposes  are to provide analysis of the economic development, labor economics, economic history, and other leading problems in the economic field. According to the SSCI Impact Factor Ranking published by Journal Citation Report in 2015, JEP ranked fifth among all economic periodicals, reaching 5.012.

Li Hongbin, director of the China Enterprises Research Center in the Institute of Quality Development Strategy of WHU and the visiting scholar of Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), has published many dissertations in first-class periodicals and sponsored scientific projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Research Grants Council. He is one of the sponsors of the China Employer-Employee Survey (CESS), and designed the index for the Labor Economics Survey, which was a great contribution to sampling and quality control.

Rewritten by Zhou Yijun

Edited by Fang Siyuan, Edmund Wai Man Lai and Hu Sijia