Loren Brandt, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Toronto
Title and Abstract:
Industrial Upgrading and Economic Growth in China
Within a span of slightly more than two decades, China has catapulted itself from near obscurity to become the world’s fifth largest economy and third largest trading country. With the manufacturing sector half of China’s GDP, and imports and exports of manufacturing goods representing more than 80 percent of China’s trade, the process of capability building and upgrading in both Chinese and multinational firms operating in China is an essential part of this story. Central to the upgrading efforts are a series of trade liberalizing and domestic market reforms that have increased competition, forced firms to invest in capability-building, and facilitated the transfer of technology and managerial and organizational know-how. In this talk, I describe this process, and provide detailed case studies of the dynamics unfolding in textiles and apparel, the auto sector, and the machine tool industry. In light of these developments, we will also examine China’s future growth prospects.
Biographical sketch:
Loren Brandt is a Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto specializing in the Chinese economy. He has been at the University of Toronto since 1987. He is also a research fellow at the IZA (The Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany and affiliated with the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT. He has published widely on the Chinese economy in leading economic journals, and has been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in both China and Vietnam. He was co-editor and major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2008), a landmark study that provides an integrated analysis of China’s unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. In the last five years, he has visited over 200 firms in China in sectors including autos and auto-parts, heavy construction, machine tool, electronics and steel.
