Assessing the health of school education systems in India

I have blogged on the issue of improving student learning outcomes numerous times. This post discusses a simple proposal for periodic measurement of learning outcomes and using it as a high-level decision support. 

Poor student learning outcomes should count as one of the biggest governance failures of India. An important contributor is the near complete absence of any institutional mechanism at higher levels to assess the quality of school education being delivered and the progress made in the achievement of basic literacy and numeracy or grade-appropriate learning outcomes. This diffuses accountability across the system at all levels. 

Any meaningful effort, therefore, to improve school education must start with a mechanism to continuously and credibly measure and track the aggregate learning outcome trends over time. This would serve as a health check on the general direction and magnitude of progress being made on improving student learning outcomes and also help compare across administrative units and geographies. It would strengthen accountability. 

A census in the form of standardised tests would be great but is impractical to do across grades and states. It’s for this reason that standardised tests globally are done at only a few checkpoints. 

Another option would be to undertake a rigorously sampled survey across grades and states. Surveys would be administered periodically to a cluster random sample of schools in each district. The baseline survey would be followed with an end-line recurring each year. This time series so generated would help assess subject-wise performance across districts and states. 

The National Assessment Survey (NAS) could be revised accordingly to serve this purpose. Alternatively, or perhaps more appropriately, the surveys could be administered by independent private assessment firms. The Government of India (GoI) could empanel a few testing firms for 3-5 years and allocate them across states. While the state governments would manage the contract, GoI would make payments to agencies. This would prevent conflicts of interest, align incentives, and maintain the rigour of the testing processes and the credibility of the outcomes. 

The firms would undertake evaluations based on some uniform and consistently applied set of principles issued by the Ministry of Education (MoE), GoI. The instruments, while different, must be standardised to test certain competencies. All data could be stored in a portal that would allow for easy longitudinal comparison of performance across administrative units and subjects. This data could also be analysed by independent researchers and provide actionable insights for policymakers and implementors than those generated by the countless randomised control trials done on this topic over the years. 

Any state government interested in expanding the scope of the survey would have the flexibility to do so. Some might want to compare across blocks or clusters or add a half-yearly midline. The expanded scope could be incorporated into the contract with the testing agency. 

The testing processes could be improved at the margins based on the emerging feedback from the first couple of tests, and the contracts could be revised accordingly. With time, over say, 2-3 years, the testing processes would have stabilised and the outcomes would provide a reliable assessment of the direction and magnitude of progress made by districts and states on different subjects. The important insights would be the trends in progress across the parameters and comparison across neighbouring or similarly placed geographies and administrative units. 

There are several areas where such information would be valuable decision support for policy making and program implementation. Some examples. 

Education Departments at all levels of government could use the survey trends to assess the direction and magnitude of progress on outcomes. Most importantly, it would allow for recognising failures and taking action to address them. Those lagging on trends would become aware of their lag and be forced to introspect on the reasons. Such introspection is critical to any meaningful effort to improve the quality of education. 

A bane of the education ecosystem is the absence of any credible system to reliably monitor outcomes. In its absence, questionable and bad ideas endure. The massive expenditures being incurred by state and central governments on Edtech despite very little evidence of its efficacy in improving learning outcomes is a case in point. More of the same without course corrections is most likely in the absence of any credible outcomes measurement system. A survey-based longitudinal learning outcomes tracking system would audit these interventions, help recognise failings, and allow officials to make the case to pull back on some of these questionable interventions. 

The MoE could consider incentivising states and districts by allocating a part of the Samagra Siksha Abhiyaan budget for the realisation of learning outcomes as measured from the aforementioned Survey. This would make outcomes-based financing of school education a reality. To make this sufficiently attractive, the allocations under this component can be made significantly large. This financing strategy could be complemented by competitions among districts and states on learning outcomes realisation.

This monitoring system should be supplemented with measures outlined here and elsewhere on interventions that are proximate to improving the quality of classroom instruction (as against those general inputs in the education objective function).

Weekend reading links

 1. Profile of Wang Chuangfu, founder of BYD

Born in 1966 in the eastern province of Anhui, Wang is part of a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs who escaped poverty to join the nation’s newly minted billionaire class... Wang’s obsession with batteries led to a pivot to vehicles in the early 2000s. Cracking the five-minute charge this week builds on his pioneering “cell-to-body” technology — sandwiching a battery cell inside a vehicle’s structure... The company’s stock rally has also taken Wang’s personal net worth, according to Bloomberg data, to just shy of $30bn, making him one of China’s richest men. Despite that he remains a workaholic who lives humbly. His house is walking distance from BYD’s main factories and he dispatches lieutenants to public-facing events unless his attendance is absolutely necessary. Underlings have long described Wang as a restrained, highly detail-orientated micromanager. His approval was once sought for a business unit to distribute fruit to team members. But his passion for batteries has revealed a performative flare. To demonstrate to an investor just how safe his battery cells are, he has drunk battery electrolyte fluid. He has reused cells after trucks drove over them and frequently shows visitors batteries being penetrated by nails.

BYD plans to manufacture in India with a JV partner.  

2. Interesting insights from a survey of over 30,000 GenZ professionals and 700 HR leaders. 

Unstop, the community engagement and hiring platform for students and graduates, said that 83% of engineering school (E-school) graduates and 46% of business school (B-school) graduates remain without a job or internship offer in its report ‘Unstop Talent Report 2025’. A significant 51% of GenZ professionals seek multiple income streams through freelancing and side hustle, with the number rising to 59% among B-school students. The report also delves into the glaring gender pay gaps. Two in three female arts & science graduates earn below ₹6 LPA, while their male counterparts largely surpass this mark. However, B-schools and E-schools demonstrate pay parity, ensuring fair compensation irrespective of gender.

3. Borders and proximity is what matters on defence spending in Europe.

There is an inverse relationship between the two, with the well-protected south of Europe skimping, and the exposed north-east spending well above the Nato mark of 2 per cent of GDP. What compounds this problem are the respective populations. Portugal, one of the lowest spenders, has more people than all three Baltic states combined. Spain is bigger than Poland.

4. Striking graphics on the rise of solar and wind generation globally since 2017.

China has built more than 120,000 wind turbines, nearly a third of the world total, and 1.5 million acres of utility-scale solar.

5. Africa's poor progress in electrification should count as one of the biggest failures of international development. 

Nearly half the continent's 1.2 billion people are without electricity.

6. The history of free speech shows that it's a more recent phenomenon.

For millennia, people thought differently about words, actions and liberty. Instead of valuing liberty of expression, their main preoccupation was to limit it. Because they were acutely aware of the power of words and the danger of lies, slanders and other kinds of harmful speech, the public policing of such things was a central feature of every premodern society across the globe. “Free” speech, by contrast, was an exceptional mode, which took different forms — divine prophecy, frank advice to a ruler, religious disputation or the exchange of ideas within the scholarly Republic of Letters. Only around 1700 did our modern notion of it, as a general right to speak out on matters of public concern, begin to emerge... 

In 1695, amid political and religious disagreements, the English parliament failed to renew a law mandating the pre-publication licensing of books. The result was an explosion of novel kinds of print, and a growing international fascination with “liberty of the press” as an engine of enlightenment. The two competing models of free speech that we’ve inherited were created in this new media world. The first approach contrasted press “liberty” (which was beneficial) with “licentiousness” (which was harmful) — responsible vs irresponsible speech, rights vs duties. That balancing attitude remains, globally, the norm... The alternative, absolutist model of free speech was invented in London in 1721 by two partisan journalists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. As I discovered, they were mainly writing to defend their own corrupt practices, and their theory was full of holes. Nonetheless, the slogans of their hit column, “Cato’s Letters”, which proclaimed that free speech was the foundation of all liberty and should never be curtailed, were soon taken up across the world, including by the rebel colonists of North America, who enshrined its clumsy formulations in their First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. No ifs, buts or qualifications. 

In no other country have speech laws ever taken that absolutist form. The subsequent history of American attitudes is full of unappreciated ironies. Even before the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, Americans abandoned its approach in favour of the balancing model popularised by the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Until the 1910s the First Amendment remained a dead letter; it was only the radical, now forgotten arguments of US socialists and communists that subsequently resurrected it. Early theorists of free speech mainly conceived of it in terms of public opinion, assuming that liberty of expression would eventually lead to consensus about everything...

But from the 1960s, as part of the cold war backlash against collectivist ideologies, interpretation of the First Amendment swung instead towards its current, libertarian outlook. This produced an American jurisprudence obsessed with clear and abstract rules — which was gradually achieved by ignoring libel, falsehood, civic harm, the responsibilities of the media and all the most difficult problems of how communication actually works in the world. Its simple, anti-governmental interpretation has also been increasingly hijacked to invalidate laws regulating businesses, restricting money in politics or otherwise attempting to uphold the common good. Legally, corporations are persons, and the First Amendment trumps everything.

The author makes an important distinction between free speech and its amplification.

It is a mistake, when grappling with freedom of expression, to focus too much on speakers. Especially in our age of 24/7 viral media, the critical issue is not speech per se but the responsibility for its amplification. It’s entirely reasonable to require the private media (whether printed, broadcast or online) through which most “public” speech is actually circulated and consumed to be transparent in their practices, and accountable to the society in which they operate. That means at a safe distance from direct governmental control, but more than just the fig leaf of “self-regulation”.

7. A frontline of the new Cold War, in central Africa.

Zambia and Tanzania are negotiating with a consortium led by the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation for a $1bn concession to rehabilitate and run the iconic... Tazara railway that links copper-rich, landlocked Zambia to Tanzania on Africa’s east coast... reviving the strategic export route to Beijing... Tazara showcases an attempt to use more equity investment by Chinese state companies after Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative was marred by defaults in borrower countries, including Zambia... Started in 1970, the Tazara railway was designed to help copper-rich Zambia access overseas markets after white-controlled neighbouring Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, shut its borders in opposition to the country gaining independence from Britain... 

Under Mao, Beijing forked out Rmb1bn in interest-free loans to build the Tazara, with thousands of Chinese labourers working alongside locals. At its peak, it ferried more than 1mn tonnes of copper, consumer goods and passengers annually. “The Tazara to this day is still the biggest Chinese aid project implemented in Africa,” said Tim Zajontz, a lecturer at the University of Freiburg. “It continues to be a symbol of the Chinese-African all-weather friendship, as many officials on both sides often refer to  it”...A rival US-backed project is under way to upgrade the colonial-era Lobito Corridor and ferry Zambia’s resources westward through Angola instead. Agreed under former president Joe Biden through the US International Development Finance Corporation, Washington is lending $553mn to the railway in a model that brought in private investors such as Trafigura and Mota-Engil.

8. While the tech stocks and US stock markets appear to be in a bubble, there are historical precedents. The US has been the leader throughout most of the last century, except a brief interregnum when Japan took over.

Big Tech's 37.4% of the market capitalisation in 2025 pales before the 62.8% capitalisation of Railways in 1900. 

9. Starlink and Space X are now the most valuable assets for Musk.

Roughly half of Musk’s $314bn net worth is now tied to SpaceX — which was valued at $350bn in a recent private tender offer — while his 20 per cent stake in Tesla has dwindled to $100bn. Morgan Stanley estimates Starlink will generate $16.3bn in revenue this year, up 74 per cent from an estimated $9.3bn in 2024, with subscribers almost doubling to 7.8mn from 4.65mn, according to a January report. By comparison, SpaceX’s rocket launch business is forecast to make $5.8bn in 2025 revenue, up 20 per cent from $4.9bn last year... Starlink has said its more than 7,000 low-orbit satellites provide service to 118 countries and territories, with Niger the latest to be connected last week... It has won contracts with major airlines including state-backed carriers Qatar Airways and Air France, shipping groups including MSC and Maersk, and cruise operators Cunard and Carnival. About a quarter of the company’s revenues come from government contracts, however. According to US filings, SpaceX has already secured 39 different Starlink contracts across the US government worth around $3.5bn, including multiple military contracts with the Department of Defense.

10. Even as he takes the chainsaw to the US federal government, it emerges that Elon Musk's companies have received $38 bn in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits in the US over 20 years, with nearly two-thirds coming in the last five years. 

“Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management, who noted that much of the funding has come during Democratic administrations. “With DOGE, there does seem to be a paradox there. He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding.” Government funding also provided key early infusions to Musk’s ventures. NASA and the Defense Department nurtured SpaceX in its earliest years with contracts that helped it build infrastructure, while the agency tolerated the company’s failure to meet required milestones on time, according to congressional investigators. The $465 million Energy Department loan, which arrived in 2010, helped fuel Tesla’s meteoric rise: With that money, the company engineered and assembled its luxury electric sedan — the Model S — and bought a factory in Fremont, California, according to the agency. Tesla went public six months later... Since its 2003 Silicon Valley founding, Tesla has benefited from billions in rebates and tax credits from California. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom (D), has claimed that “there was no Tesla without California’s regulatory bodies, and regulation.”... About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other automakers... Tesla is the largest seller of these credits to automakers that don’t meet the standards and want to avoid paying a fine.

And that of Space X

11. Big Tech and job creation graphic of the day, Nvidia edition. (HT: Adam Tooze).

Even as its revenues doubled in 2024 from $61 bn to $130 bn, its headcount went up by just 20%!

12. The rise of Chinese e-commerce giants, Shein and Temu, has become a lightning rod for the backlash against cheap imports. President Trump ordered a halt in February to the so-called de minimis shipments, duty-free entry without inspections of parcels worth up to $800. 

The number of duty-free shipments to the United States has risen more than tenfold since 2016, to four million parcels per day last year. Similar shipments to the European Union have climbed even faster, reaching 12 million parcels a day last year. Duty-free shipments to developing countries like Thailand and South Africa have also surged… Last summer, South Africa imposed 45 percent tariffs on even the smallest imports of clothing. Thailand ended its exemption of low-value imported parcels from sales taxes, although it continues to allow tariff-free entry of parcels up to 1,500 Thai baht ($44). And the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, proposed this month to end the 27-nation bloc’s duty-free treatment of packages worth up to 150 euros ($156)…

Guangzhou has emerged as the global hub of de minimis shipments… Shein and Temu, competing Chinese e-commerce giants that together hold at least a third of the de minimis industry, coordinate much of their supply chains from large offices in Guangzhou… Yiwu, a city 600 miles northeast of Guangzhou with a vast wholesale market, has become another hub. It coordinates de minimis exports of toys, hats and other small items from towns scattered across the Yangtze River delta.

13. Mihir Sharma hits the nail on its head in his diagnosis of the ongoing trade wars

The fundamental flaw at the heart of how international trade in the era of the World Trade Organization (WTO) functions is the polite assumption that all economies are similarly structured. In other words, that costs, subsidies, and protections are transparent. Unfortunately, the biggest trading power in the world does not meet these criteria. If the People’s Republic of China violates this assumption, then the entire trading system is built on a lie. It is to this baseline problem that US actions, and those of others from the European Union to India, are responding. China’s accession to the WTO was premised on the assumption that its economy was, or eventually would be, comparable to the market economies that designed the system. The fact that it was not then; nor has it tried hard enough since to become one. As a consequence, it has built up imbalances domestically — and, thanks to its sheer size, those imbalances have expanded and mutated till they cover the entire world...

Hidden subsidies to power, land, and capital mean that competing with Chinese manufacturing has become very difficult for more transparently-run economies. By some estimates, China has the lowest average electricity price for industrial users among major economies. It is about 60 per cent of the equivalent in India, and about a quarter that of Germany’s. Meanwhile, it has increased and is still increasing the use of targeted tax subsidies in export-oriented sectors such as electric cars, batteries, and solar panels. There is no recourse within the WTO system for China’s trading partners if they want to correct this issue. It is not entirely surprising that both parties in the US have lost faith in WTO dispute settlement.

14. Africa's India rice dependency

Africa is typically a large market for broken rice — accounting for more than 80 per cent of India’s exports over 2018-20, according to data from the International Food Policy Research Institute. In 2022, Indian rice accounted for more than 60 per cent of rice imports for 17 African countries and more than 80 per cent in nine, including Somalia.

15. Trump bump has raised the flagging prospects of political leaders in many allied countries. 

16. In so far as it brought together the Bannonite nationalists, the MAGA populists, and plutocrats under one umbrella, the Trump coalition was one of opportunism. And its internal contradictions are now starting to show on the back of the DoGE cuts on welfare spending and associated departments. 

Over the next few months, he will have to find a way to balance the interests of both the fiscal hawks and billionaire allies, who want to radically downsize the federal government, and his working-class Maga base, which has become heavily reliant on government support... a growing section of voters has come to rely on government transfers, the result of an ageing society and rising inequality. These include Medicaid for poorer families and Medicare and Social Security for retirees. In 2000, according to the Economic Innovation Group, a think-tank, just 10.4 per cent of counties in the US derived a quarter or more of their total personal income from transfers. But by 2022, that had risen to 53 per cent of counties in the US. Many of those counties are in the sort of rural areas where Trump is hugely popular. 

“As much as Republicans like to rail against big government, [their voters are] often its biggest beneficiaries,” says John Mark Hansen, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Or as Steve Bannon, one of the architects of Trump’s initial rise to power, put it in a recent podcast: “Medicaid’s going to be a complicated one . . . a lot of Maga’s on Medicaid.”... Income from government transfers was the fastest-growing major component of Americans’ personal income, according to the EIG report last year. It said they made up 18 per cent of all personal income in the US in 2022 — a total of $3.8tn — with the share more than doubling since 1970. Transfers, which include state pensions and state health insurance, as well as veterans’ benefits, food stamps, unemployment insurance and other benefits, were now the third largest source of Americans’ personal income, after income from work and investments, EIG said. The main driver of this trend, EIG said, was the ageing of the US population. Because the largest transfer programmes — Social Security and Medicare — are aimed at people of retirement age, transfer payments expand as the elderly population grows... 

The trend is not confined to a few poor pockets of the country. The report says that “most US counties depend on a level of government transfer income that was once reserved only for the most distressed places”. It said the transfer share runs highest in parts of the country that are “rural, old and poor”. Some of these, Appalachia and the rural South, are firmly Republican... A report by the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University in January found that there are 15 states where at least one-fifth or more of non-elderly adults in small towns and rural areas are covered by Medicaid. Of these, eight voted for Trump in November.

Lowering US merchandise deficits and restoring manufacturing

As President Trump wages war on trade deficits and flaunts tariffs indiscriminately, some proposals are on the table to address the problem. Three in particular are getting attention. 

Robert E Lighthizer, the US Trade Representative in the first Trump administration, and arguably the ideological godfather of the Trump administration’s push against China and embrace of tariffs, has advocated a new trade regime among countries with democratic governments and mostly free economies. The main underlying principle behind this regime would be long-term trade balance. 

The regime would have a two-tier tariff structure. The countries outside the regime will pay a higher tariff while those within would pay lower tariffs, which, however, could be adjusted over time to ensure balance. If a country runs large and persistent surpluses, others would raise tariffs on it so as to bring it down over a reasonable time. This would ensure balance within the entire group over time, and not across country pairs or smaller groups every year.

Another proposal, published in November 2024 by Stephen Miran, the current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump administration (and then at Hudson Bay Capital), points to the work of Belgian economist Robert Triffin from the early 1960s in the context of the Bretton Woods system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates. The Triffin Paradox highlighted the dilemma, faced by a country whose currency serves as the global reserve currency, between maintaining its own economic stability and ensuring global liquidity. 

The global demand for dollars can be met only with persistent deficits. America must supply dollars to enable foreigners to buy its Treasury Bonds. This keeps the dollar overvalued for some time and erodes America’s manufacturing and export competitiveness. However, in the long run, persistent deficits must weaken the dollar and erode its credibility as a reserve currency. 

In Triffin world, the reserve asset producer must run persistent current account deficits as the flip side of exporting reserve assets. USTs become exported products which fuel the global trade system. In exporting USTs, America receives foreign currency, which is then spent, usually on imported goods. America runs large current account deficits not because it imports too much, but it imports too much because it must export USTs to provide reserve assets and facilitate global growth.

Since President Trump wants to lower the deficit without diminishing the dollar’s global influence, unilateral actions like devaluation or monetary loosening are risky and unlikely to work. Even tariffs have their limitations. Miran, therefore, proposes that the US offer its trade partners a deal. The economic side of the deal will involve the maturity transformation of US Treasuries by “persuading” foreign holders to switch from short-term to perpetual dollar bonds. In return, the US could offer a political alliance and its defence umbrella. 

This is a monetization of the American role in the post-War Western alliance. In fact, Martin Wolf describes this proposed global exchange rate management mechanism as a form of “protection racket”. Miran writes

America provides a global defense shield to liberal democracies, and in exchange, America receives the benefits of reserve status—and, as we are grappling with today, the burdens. This connection helps explain why President Trump views other nations as taking advantage of America in both defense and trade simultaneously: the defense umbrella and our trade deficits are linked, through the currency… Such an architecture would mark a shift in global markets as big as Bretton Woods or its end. It would see our trading partners bear an increased share of the burden of financing global security, and the financing means would be via a weaker dollar reallocating aggregate demand to the United States and a reallocation of interest rate risk from U.S. taxpayers to foreign taxpayers. It would also more clearly demarcate the lines of the American defense umbrella, removing some uncertainty around who is or is not eligible for protection.

Coming from two of the most influential and credible insiders, these must be taken seriously. 

However, without getting into the details of either, the biggest challenge with both proposals is their implementability. Both assume an alliance led by the US, where allies accept some form of explicitly acknowledged US suzerainty and also bear the costs of maintaining that protection umbrella. 

Lighthizer proposes to create a new trade regime among allies. Thanks to its several moving parts, its operationalization will be very complicated. The biggest challenge would be in getting countries to exercise voluntary self-restraint and raise tariffs. The distortions arising from such complex forced incentives can be unpredictable and self-defeating.

Given the events since President Trump’s inauguration and his track record, it’s unlikely that any country will be “persuaded” into the arrangements proposed by Miran. So, it looks dead on arrival. In theory, too, its assumption of a causal link between the US manufacturing decline and the dollar’s role as a reserve is questionable. The former is a long-term secular trend.^.

Besides, it’s also shared by the US with other advanced countries. The US neither has the highest nor lowest decline in the share of manufacturing employment.

As Wolf writes, for all of Miran’s argument about the long-term erosion of the credibility of the reserve currency, the USD exchange rate has been remarkably stable.

A third proposal is that espoused by Michael Pettis, who points to a link between persistent trade deficits and capital inflows. Pettis argues that capital inflows and deficits are two sides of the same coin, with the former boosting the dollar’s value, misallocating resources through excessive financialisation, and eroding the country’s industrial base. So, he advocates taxing capital inflows. 

Gillian Tett writes about this idea gaining currency. 

Six years ago, Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin and Josh Hawley, her Republican counterpart, issued a congressional bill, the Competitive Dollar for Jobs and Prosperity Act, which called for taxes on capital inflows and a Federal Reserve weak-dollar policy. The bill seemed to die. But last month American Compass, a conservative think-tank close to vice-president JD Vance, declared that taxes on capital inflows could raise $2tn over the next decade. Then the White House issued an “America First Investment Policy” executive order that pledged to “review whether to suspend or terminate” a 1984 treaty that, among other things, removed a prior 30 per cent tax on Chinese capital inflows… And Pettis’s ideas seem to be influential among some advisers, such as Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Vance. 

While Lighthizer proposes the use of tariffs directly and Miran’s preferred instrument is the US Treasuries, Pettis advocates taxing capital flows. As I have written in my co-authored book, financialization has gone too far with adverse consequences and it’s essential to throw sand in the wheels of cross-border finance. However, given the scale and interconnectedness of cross-border flows, only the US can restrain such financialisation. Pettis's suggestion is therefore a step in the right direction. 

But it too, like the others is unlikely to do much in reversing the US trade deficits and manufacturing. 

The central problem that Trump wants to solve is the persistent US merchandise deficit, and tariffs are his primary weapon. The underlying premise is that tariffs will discourage imports and encourage domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately, such single-instrument approaches to complex problems are not only blunt but also likely to detract from focusing on the deeper underlying causes. 

Apart from reversing the long-term trend of manufacturing decline, there are several problems to be overcome like declining business dynamism, productivity growth, excessive financialisation, and high levels of business concentration. 

Fortunately, thanks to the policies initiated by President Trump in his first tenure, the US has made a good start in its endeavour to redress the imbalances and restore its manufacturing competitiveness. The tariffs and restrictions on China had reversed the course of US deficits with that country. Others too had realised that the Chinese subsidies and industrial policy since the pandemic and the bursting of its real estate bubble had unleashed excess capacity and dumping, which was shutting their local manufacturing and eliminating jobs. They were retaliating and putting up restrictions in various forms. 

The momentum on all these must be maintained and hastened, especially by stopping Chinese exports from finding their way through “connector” countries. Addressing the world economy’s China problem is a challenging task that requires the US to coordinate and carry together its allies and other major economies. Unfortunately, the current policies of the Trump administration run the risk of hurting progress on all these fronts. 

The wave of industrial policy actions, especially the large schemes announced by the Biden administration in the US, are also steps in the right direction. There are clear signatures of a spike in US manufacturing investments and reshoring of supply chains. This momentum too must be kept up. Here too, there’s a risk that the Trump administration may not only take the foot off the pedal but even reverse course on industrial policy. 

Finally, the dominance of the plutocrats from Wall Street and Big Tech in the Trump administration poses considerable risks in taking action in important areas like anti-trust and financialisation. Ultimately, it may be too much to expect a businessman to free America from the clutches of plutocracy. 

China economy update - March 2025

This is the latest in the series of periodic updates on China. It covers the issues of structural imbalances, the use of industrial and foreign policy to promote its exporters and secure its interests, and more examples of its rising dominance in some sectors. 

1. Without understanding the fundamental structural imbalance in the Chinese economy, both Chinese government officials and Western leaders like Donald Trump feel that China’s trade surplus can be lowered by making the country import more products and services. But as Michael Pettis writes, this rests on shaky ground.

China will not reduce its trade surplus by "importing more competitive and high-quality products and services". Incremental changes in specific imports and exports have almost no impact on the overall imbalance. That's because if the total value of everything China produces exceeds the total value of China's domestic investment and its domestic consumption, the difference is equal to China's trade surplus. Some analysts argue that if Beijing could buy more sanctioned high-tech goods, this would reduce China's trade surplus, but of course it wouldn't. The incremental purchases would simply be matched by fewer other imports or more other exports.

He presents the choices for China

There are literally only three ways China can reduce its trade surplus. One way, obviously, is to produce less, but of course that would be extremely painful economically and would force up unemployment. Beijing would do all it could to avoid this "solution". A second way would be to invest more domestically, but with years of excess investment in property, infrastructure and, increasingly, manufacturing capacity, China can only do this to the extent that it is willing to allow a much faster rise in its debt burden. The third way – the "good" way – would be to force up the consumption share of Chinese GDP, but Beijing has been talking about doing this for over a decade and is finding it too difficult to pull off. It would require a transformation of the domestic distribution of income.

But without changing this fundamental domestic imbalance between investment and savings, China will not alter its trade surplus, no matter how much it spends incrementally on imports of high-tech goods, soybeans, or anything else. To suggest otherwise is muddled thinking. By the way if global trade conflict forces a contraction in China's trade surplus, these are the same options Beijing faces. That is why China, like most persistent surplus countries, is so worried about a worsening global trade environment.

2. The most important imbalance in the Chinese economy is the low household consumption share of GDP. Adding to it is the country’s low public spending on individuals.

China’s state spends only about 6 per cent of GDP on what is known as individual consumption — services ranging from healthcare to social security that directly benefit citizens — while households spend another 38 per cent, according to data by the World Bank. Analysis of the data showed government spending on individual consumption in China, which is classified as an upper-middle income country by the World Bank, lags behind most members of the Brics group of emerging nations, including Brazil and Russia. It is also lower than that of many other emerging and developed economies.

This low public spending is reflected, for example, in the high out-of-pocket spending on catastrophic medical episodes by Chinese households.

Despite China’s growing wealth, the proportion of families suffering catastrophic health expenditure has risen. The Lancet study found that 21.7 per cent of households suffered catastrophic medical expenditure in 2018 as measured by out-of-pocket health spending greater than 10 per cent of total household consumption, up from 20.4 per cent in 2007. For rural households, the increase was sharper — to 27 per cent from about 18 per cent over the same period… By contrast, the global average incidence of catastrophic health expenditure of 10 per cent or more of total household spending was 13.2 per cent in 2017, the Lancet study found. In Russia and Malaysia, two countries with similar per-capita GDP to China, the ratio was 7.7 per cent and 1.5 per cent, respectively.

3. These imbalances arise from several distortions in the economy. Just before it demitted office, the Biden administration initiated an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act on how China uses non-market practices to dominate the global maritime, logistics, and ship-building industry. Rana Faroohar writes about China’s trade-distorting policies in the sector, especially the one arising from the hukou system.

There are the usual problems, like massive state loans and access to non-market excess capacity in raw materials. Then there are the distortions in the Chinese labour market that make it nearly impossible for market economies to compete in the maritime sector, where China now has a market share of more than 50 per cent. 

One of the most interesting sections of the report dives deep into the hukou system. In this, Chinese citizens are classified as rural or urban residents, and can’t receive state benefits such as education, housing, or healthcare outside the jurisdiction in which they were born. Since many rural residents migrate to coastal areas to work, the result is that half of the population resides in urban areas, but only a third have an urban classification. That has a hugely distorting effect on Chinese and global labour markets. As one scholar quoted in the report notes, the hukou system creates a “huge class of super-exploitable, yet highly mobile or flexible industrial workers for China’s new economy, now closely integrated into global trade networks”. It is essentially a massive state transfer from labour to the owners of capital, which is one of the reasons why Chinese economists concerned about bolstering domestic consumption would like to get rid of it (hukou reform is happening, though not as fast as many would like). It’s also one of many ways in which China’s system is incompatible with the Bretton Woods trading system as it exists today. “There’s no question that China’s very different economic model makes it difficult to have a system of globalisation based on WTO rules,” notes economist and Nobel laureate Michael Spence. Indeed, that’s the reason that Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, pushed (albeit unsuccessfully) for a new model of trade based on setting a floor, rather than a ceiling, on environmental and labour standards.

The USTR Section 301 investigation report on China’s targeting of maritime, logistics, and ship-building sectors for dominance points to the contribution of the country’s hukou system. This is a good description of the hukou system. 

Under the hukou system administered by the Chinese government, every Chinese citizen is classified at birth as either an “agricultural” (rural) or “non-agricultural” (urban) resident and registered with a local jurisdiction (a city, town, or village) that is considered that person’s official and only place of “permanent residence.” This local hukou typically passes from mother to child and entitles the holder to services including education, housing, healthcare, and social welfare provided by the local jurisdiction. Transferring the place of registration of one’s hukou is a difficult bureaucratic process.

The hukou has persisted despite the rapid urban expansion that has resulted in large migration from rural to urban areas, and from the hinterland to coastal regions. The result is that while half the population live in urban areas whereas only a third of the urban population has an urban hukou. 

As one scholar has noted, the hukou system has created a “huge class of super-exploitable, yet highly mobile or flexible industrial workers for China’s new economy, now closely integrated into global trade networks.” Several hukou-related factors continue to limit labor mobility. First, rural hukou holders have shown reluctance to transfer their hukou to an urban location because it requires them to relinquish their increasingly valuable rural land-use rights, which in many cases represents the only retirement security that rural residents and their families have. Second, rural residents that migrate outside the geographical area of their hukou registration may not have access to public services, healthcare benefits, housing, the educational system and formal employment under a written labor contract… (it) provide indirect non-market advantages that increase costs for migrant workers by depriving them of local social benefits, and benefit producers, as businesses indirectly benefit from reduced labor costs as a result of reduced social welfare costs.

4. China has always used industrial policy and foreign policy as instruments to further its interests. As an example, Chinese manufacturers have been establishing manufacturing facilities in places like Mexico, Hungary, and Vietnam. 

In fact, Vietnam is rapidly becoming an off-shore site for Chinese manufacturers who now form a third of all new investments in the country. This also creates vulnerabilities given its trade surplus with US surging to $123.5 bn in 2024, the third biggest after Mexico and China. Companies such as Apple and Intel have moved production facilities to Vietnam to diversify away from the mainland. 

Vietnam is also increasingly getting investment from Chinese companies, accounting for 28 per cent of new projects last year, up from 22 per cent in 2023… Most Chinese manufacturing investments in Vietnam were being made to avoid US tariffs and secure a different “certificate of origin” for goods produced by Chinese companies… In the first month of 2025, Chinese companies accounted for 30 per cent of projects…Chinese investments also came via Hong Kong and Singapore, the latter of which was the top investor in dollar terms in Vietnam last year… The US accounts for nearly 30 per cent of Vietnam’s exports… Most Chinese investment in Vietnam is in assembly and low-to-mid-end manufacturing, from cars to solar panels. China’s strict curbs during the Covid-19 pandemic also pushed some companies to diversify outside the country. A small percentage of Chinese goods were also relabelled “Made in Vietnam” without any value-added and rerouted to the US, experts said, a practice that is illegal… 38% of Vietnam's imports came from China, while 30% of exports went to US.

5. Kyle Chan has a good summary of China’s Faustian Bargain for foreign firms. 

Foreign firms agree to a Faustian bargain where they profit from selling to China’s market in the near term but build up their future Chinese competitors in the long run… Foreign companies agree to build manufacturing plants in China, form joint ventures with Chinese companies, set up R&D centers, share technology and production techniques, and even sell off parts of their business… Over time, China pushes these foreign firms to share more technology and use more Chinese suppliers. Foreign companies end up training a whole cohort of Chinese engineers and managers who can later help Chinese companies or even launch new startups. Time and again, foreign firms start with a useful partnership but end up helping to grow their most formidable competitors.

Foreign firms find three attractive aspects - market access, low-cost manufacturing, and an arrogance and overconfidence that they can dominate the Chinese market (this Elon Musk interview on BYD is epic). Apart from this, China was a major market for these companies - Apple made $227 bn in operating profit in China over the past 10 years (a quarter of its total operating profit in the period), Volkswagen made over €54 billion in operating profit in China over the past 15 years, and GM made over $17 bn in profit in China over 2012-23. Chinese, in turn, demand localisation and technology-sharing through JVs for market access. Soon the Chinese JV partners mastered the technology, innovated, and out-competed and muscled out their foreign partners. 

6. In another blog, Kyle Chan describes how China is using industrial diplomacy and technology controls to reshape a China-centric supply chain. He points to how Chinese companies are racing to build factories around the world and forge new global supply chains, especially in “connector countries” like Mexico and Vietnam, driven by a desire to circumvent tariffs and secure access to markets. It’s encouraging Chinese companies to build plants in “friendly” countries while discouraging them from investing in others in a kind of “industrial diplomacy.” Hungary and Brazil are two examples of “friendly” countries where capacity expansion has been happening at frenetic pace, whereas India and Philippines stand at the unfriendly end. 

India, a likely competitor, is a major economy where Chinese companies have seen restrictions.

Electronics. Recently, Beijing appears to be limiting Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn from bringing Chinese equipment and Chinese workers to India. Some of Foxconn’s Chinese workers in India were even told to return to China. This informal Chinese ban extends to other electronics firms working in India but notably does not seem to affect countries in the Middle East or Southeast Asia.

Automotive. Beijing has told Chinese automakers specifically not to invest in India. India has been increasing scrutiny of Chinese automotive investment, blocking a 2023 plan by BYD to set up a plant in Hyderabad on national security grounds and putting pressure on SAIC’s MG brand.

Solar equipment. China has been reportedly blocking the export of Chinese solar equipment to India. India’s solar industry relies heavily on China for inputs, including for 80% of India’s solar cells and modules, as well as manufacturing equipment.

Tunnel boring machines. TBMs made in China by Germany’s Herrenknecht for export to India have been reportedly held up by Chinese customs.

Noah Smith too has an essay on the same topic here. 

7. Kyle Chan draws attention to an important aspect of Chinese industrial policy by pointing to its unique “overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems” which create a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. 

China has developed multiple tech-industrial ecosystems that overlap in terms of the firms and technologies involved. China doesn’t just have a smartphone industry or a battery industry or an electric vehicle industry. It has all of these industries and more. China’s strength across multiple overlapping industries creates a compounding effect for its industrial policy efforts… China has created a system of interlocking industries. As China becomes stronger in some industries, this tightens its grip on others… 

In a number of cases, you have what I call “industrial coevolution” where two or more related industries develop together in an iterative, two-way process. This is happening now with China’s EV and battery industries, which makes sense given how deeply dependent these two industries are on one another. China’s EV industry leveraged the existing scale that China’s battery manufacturing industry enjoyed, which in turn gave China’s battery industry even more production volume and manufacturing experience. This is also happening with China’s battery industry and its solar industry where solar plants are increasingly being deployed with integrated battery energy storage systems (BESS). Industrial coevolution can also happen across multiple industries simultaneously: for example, China’s lidar, EV, drone, and autonomous vehicle industries. And the co-development of this nexus of industries can have spillover effects into other industries, such as the proliferation of new kinds of autonomous equipment in agriculture, mining, construction, and energy...

As a result, Chinese tech companies are increasingly becoming tech Swiss Army knives, starting in one industry but then quickly branching out into a range of adjacent tech domains: smartphones, EVs, autonomous vehicles, generative AI, drones, robotics. You have smartphone makers like Xiaomi jumping into EVs, drone makers like DJI jumping into lidar, EV makers like BYD jumping into semiconductors or Li Auto jumping into humanoid robots, and traditional internet companies like Baidu jumping into autonomous vehicles. These days, it’s almost strange if you’re a Chinese tech or electronics company and you don’t have your own cutting-edge large language model. Chinese tech companies used to model themselves after Google, Apple, or Facebook, but now they look more like Elon Musk’s Tesla/xAI. And of course, there is the ultimate Chinese tech generalist, at the center of so many of China’s tech-industrial ambitions: Huawei.

8. Some more links about emerging developments on China.

An area where Chinese companies have arguably built their greatest dominance is in critical minerals extraction and processing. FT points to new research by AidData at the College of William & Mary in the US, which shows that China’s control of critical minerals across the developing world was built up over the last two decades through lending by a network of 26 state-backed financial institutions. They gave loans worth nearly $57 bn from 2000 to 2021 to 19 low and middle-income countries for mining and processing copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth minerals central for solar panels and EV batteries. 

The research also found that this state-backed lending was to entities with long-term control over extraction and processing of strategic mineral deposits where Chinese firms held ownership stakes. 

The study contrasts the critical minerals financing from the lending under the BRI projects

Unlike most loans made for BRI projects, which are dominated by a handful of Chinese development banks, the network of lenders to the mineral sector was much broader. Beijing’s state-owned commercial banks, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China and Citic, play the largest role. However, a much larger network of 86 entities, including 26 Chinese official sector entities as well as scores of private Chinese companies and some non-Chinese financiers, also provided financing alongside Chinese state-backed participants in syndicated loans. This represents a much more diversified creditor base than traditional BRI lending… 

The minerals lending also mostly involved serial lending, rather than one-off loans, in contrast to the BRI. State lenders initially provided an acquisition loan to help a Chinese company gain an ownership stake in a mine, before further credit facilities were extended for development and to provide working capital… AidData showed that about one-quarter of China’s mineral lending was backed by a Chinese guarantor, compared with an estimated 4 per cent in Beijing’s broader overseas lending portfolio, reflecting an increased emphasis on risk mitigation and safeguarding investment returns.

The lending was mostly targeted at upstream resource extraction, AidData said. This helped secure China’s access to raw materials, creating a vertically integrated Chinese-controlled supply chain, while avoiding competing with its own domestic mineral processing industry. The data showed that two-thirds of the financing went into JVs or SPVs where the host government held no significant level of ownership. Bypassing local governments reduced those countries’ financial liabilities but also potentially limited their access to future financial returns.

In the context of critical minerals and the Chinese restrictions, Javier Blas introduces a dose of realism.

Beijing has targeted five metals: tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium. China is the biggest producer of all of them...My calculations suggest the US spends about $300 million importing tungsten; roughly $30 million on bismuth; about $90 million on indium; and less than $1 million on tellurium. The total annual cost for all four comes to less than $500 million... it’s the same trend as the one observed in the much-hyped rare earth elements sector. Fears abound, but the cost of importing the 17 metals that form that category is tiny. The US Geological Survey calculated rare earth imports at less than $200 million in 2023... 

The import bill of minor metals could increase by five, 10, 20, even 50 times, and not amount to more than a rounding error for the US economy. Prices, however, are lower today than they were a decade ago. Did you notice when they were high? Nope; for a reason. Indium, for example, traded as high as $800 per kilogram in 2011; it’s now at $345. The cost of the most common compound of tungsten, one of the much-hyped critical minerals, is trading 25% below its 2011 peak. Even if prices rise because of Chinese restrictions, recycling will increase, American engineers will work to reduce their use and alternatives will be found. High prices cure high prices.

9. BYD is surging ahead and entrenching its dominance of innovation in the EV market with two announcements. First, it unveiled a new charging system, Super e-Platform, that can add about 470 km in range to BYD’s batteries in just five minutes, just as fast as filling up cars with petrol or diesel. The platform has a charging power of 1000 kW and takes up to 1000 Amps, allowing it to charge batteries at the rate of 2 km per second. The platform has been tested for safety risks, shorter battery lifespans, and costs of installation. This advance appears to have been brought about by a more sophisticated battery cooling system that allows the battery to reach peak charging power faster and sustain it longer. In contrast, the Teslas take 15 minutes to charge 320 km and Mercedes Benz’s new super-charger takes 10 minutes to charge 325 km. 

This follows an announcement that its “God’s Eye” advanced driver-assistance system will be made available for free on all its models, including its cheapest models. It includes advanced options like remote parking using smartphones and autonomous overtaking on roads. The announcement said that BYD wants to make advanced driver-assistance systems an essential tool like safety belts and airbags. 

These announcements also demonstrate BYD’s leadership across the EV value chain - EV, battery, charging technology, and drive management software. It also ensures easier and tighter integration of all systems when compared to rivals. 

While it’s doing great on technology, BYD’s biggest worry may be the questions being raised about its factories and investments in Mexico (local opposition to a new factory), Hungary (investigated by EU authorities), and Brazil (slavery-like conditions in its factory). This is a good profile of Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s metallurgist founder. It focused initially on lithium batteries for mobile phones like Nokia and Motorola, and then shifted to vehicles in the early 2000s and pioneered the “cell-to-body” technology that sandwiched a battery cell inside a vehicle’s structure. 

10. The DeepSeek is only the latest example where Chinese companies have been exploring all pathways available in their pursuit of market dominance. In this endeavour, as Leo Lewis writes, Chinese businesses appear to have perfected the Japanese management technique of kaizen, continuous improvement. 

As well as directly observing kaizen in action at Japanese manufacturing operations, Chinese companies, according to recruitment agents in Tokyo, have found they can lure away Japanese semiconductor, railway and robotics engineers as consultants. This is not new, say the agents, but it is now sharply accelerating. Japanese companies tend to retire highly qualified people early, have not, for some years during the deflationary period, paid them especially handsomely and have instilled less parting loyalty than they might have hoped. They can be paid well by a Chinese company and, without explicitly imparting industrial secrets, their worth is immense: kaizen is fundamentally a process of trial and error, and an experienced engineer can impart the invaluable, cost-saving nod on what was tried but didn’t work.

11. While the debate on Chinese trade surpluses and tariffs has been largely focused on the developed markets, I have long maintained that Chinese exports are perhaps an even greater threat to developing countries like India. The cheap Chinese exports create problems in two dimensions - they distort the playing field and erode domestic manufacturing base; and they displace exports from other developing countries. 

While the former is well known, the latter is equally important. Sample this:

During the China Shock period, Chinese imports primarily replaced imports from other Asian countries, not US production: the overall portion of imports into the United States from Pacific Rim countries remained constant between 1990 and 2017 with only China’s share of those importsincreasing substantially, and Americans’ import consumption remained stable during the China Shock period.

Cheap Chinese manufatures are a threat not only to the domestic manufacturing base of developing countries, but also to their exporters in other markets.

12. Finally from a recent RAND report on China’s dominance of global exports of high-tech goods.