World Economic and Political Biweekly Forum：Cai Fang, Chief Expert of the National High-end Think Tank of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences- ‘Knowing China to know the world’

The eighth World Economic and Political Bi-weekly Forum was held on March 25, 2021. Cai Fang, Academician of CASS and the Chief Expert of the National High-end Think Tank of CASS, gave a lecture on ‘Knowing China to Know the World’. Yao Zhizhong, Secretary-General of NIGS presided over the forum. Zou Zhibo, Deputy Director of the IWEP, Feng Weijiang, Deputy Secretary-General of the NIGS and Deputy Director of the IWEP, and other researchers of the institute attended the lecture.

Cai Fang points out that China is facing many challenges in achieving its new development goals. For example, the negative growth of the working-age population led to a supply-side shock, which would reduce the potential growth rate. Meanwhile, the future negative growth of the total population may bring a demand-side shock that would impede the realization of the potential growth rate. The Japanese economy once fell into the ‘high-income trap’ due to shocks from both the supply- and demand-side. If China cannot cope with the shocks well, it may face the danger of falling into the ‘middle-income trap’ or ‘threshold effect’. To solve the problem and achieve the new development goals, we need to improve the social system and mechanism by continuously promoting reform and innovation, to increase productivity by creating an environment of ‘creative destruction’, to reduce income gap via redistribution, to promote the equalization of basic public services, and to achieve the unity of fairness and efficiency. At the end of the lecture, Professor Cai Fang answered in detail questions from the audience.