Brasil e China no Reordenamento das Relações ... - Funag

albert keidel
the crisis storm broke in September. In this way, China’s quasi-fiscal
stimulus program launched to fight the crisis simultaneously countered
the domestic anti-inflation growth slump.
In any event, China was the first major economy to launch a
significant anti-crisis domestic stimulus program focused heavily on
job-creating public investments and services. In November of 2008
authorities announced a two-year spending program worth roughly
15 percent of GDP. It was financed mainly by bank loans to local and
national infrastructure, education, and healthcare projects, with emphasis
on mass transportation. The effort’s success in translating bank liquidity
into job-creating “shovel-ready” projects was an illustration of the
effectiveness of China’s repressed financial system in generating savings
to fund public-goods projects.
With major banks nearly all either state-owned or state-controlled
and offering only officially administered low deposit rates, China’s
banks are a source of affordable government investment finance. A major
ingredient in the system is the high quality of project selection and the
financial discipline forced on each individual project as the result of its
required independent accounting status. Note that China’s funding of
for-profit investment comes not from bank loans but from enterprise
retained earnings and private equity contributions. These amounts are
significantly larger than bank lending and much larger than the portion
of bank lending supporting public investments.
The timing of the stimulus fit well with the march of events.
The fourth quarter of 2008 saw a partial collapse of trade-related
manufacturing, as new orders died but old orders continued to be filled
from work in progress, lasting until the first quarter of 2009. At that
point export growth also slumped, but the domestic stimulus took over,
and seasonally adjusted data on GDP growth for the second quarter
reported a dramatic recovery (Figure 2). By the end of 2009 the policy
task had switched to one of assuring that the stimulus didn’t result in an
overheated economy. In less than 12 months, China had weathered the
world’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
China not only managed the crisis swiftly, China’s crisis response
accelerated economic modernization in a range of useful dimensions.
We have already seen how an unpopular program to close low-end
manufactures in southern China received a boost from the crisis
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