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This talk develops a new representative firm-level dataset for Chinese manufacturing from 1998 to 2019 by combining tax, registry, and inspection records and correcting for sampling biases in existing administrative data. Using a CES production framework with firm-specific distortions, the talk introduces a novel decomposition of aggregate TFP growth into efficient growth and changes in misallocation. The analysis documents a sharp slowdown in Chinese manufacturing productivity growth after 2010, driven both by weaker incumbent-firm productivity growth and by a diminished contribution from firm turnover and reallocation.

Loren Brandt is a professor of economics at the University of Toronto specializing in the Chinese economy. He has published widely on the Chinese economy in leading economic journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica and the Journal of Political Economy, and been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in both China and Vietnam. With Thomas Rawski, he completed Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries (Cambridge University Press, 2019), an interdisciplinary effort analyzing the effect of government policy on the power and telecom sectors in China. He was also co-editor and major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which provides an integrated analysis of China’s unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. His current research focuses on issues of entrepreneurship and firm dynamics, industrial policy and innovation, and economic growth and structural change.