Speaker: Qiao Liu, Professor of Finance; Dean, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University

As China’s economy shifts from high-speed growth to a medium-to-high-speed growth stage, maintaining an economic growth rate of around 5% per year has become a more frequently anchored goal when China plans its economic work and formulate macro policies. At the same time, pessimistic narrative about China’s economic prospects gradually emerged and begin to pervade mainstream media. China’s economic miracle over the past four decades has benefited from productivity growth in the process of industrialization and the “government + market” growth paradigm. In the future, the biggest challenge for China’s economic and social development is to maintain the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP). Different from most industrialized economies that have been experiencing an inadequate TPF growth of less than one percent per year, the driving forces for China’s continued productivity growth are real, which is cause for optimism.

Qiao Liu is Dean and professor of finance at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He is a leading authority on economics and finance in China and is recognized form his academic work in corporate finance, financial markets and the Chinese economy. He was named the Chang Jiang Scholar Special Term Professor by the Ministry of Education, a Distinguished Young Scholar by the National Science Foundation of China and the Most Influential Economist of 2017 by China Newsweek.