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This policy brief provides an overview of Finland's dependency on imports from China in both a national and EU context. As trade figures based on value added only provide a rough notion of China's contribution to final consumption, we also consider import dependence from the goods imports figures of Finnish Customs to assess import dependence directly for specific product groups. As many products of Chinese origin are imported as semifinished goods or components for products finished in another EU country, we break down also the import dependency of the EU on China by specific product groups. We then compare Finland's domestic production of select industrial product groups against comparable imports from China. We analyze Finland's dependence on China for critical raw materials and identify potential alternative sources for key product groups for which Finland and the EU are currently dependent on China.

China's real estate and construction sector has served as a major engine of economic growth in recent decades and the sector now plays an oversized role in the economy. Much of that growth has been debt-fuelled, with the indebtedness of developers climbing to unprecedented levels. After officials turned off the money spigot last year, housing markets cooled and a wave of financial difficulties washed over builders during autumn 2021. The entire sector found itself under heavy stress, and in December two major developers, Evergrande and Kaisa, defaulted on their offshore debt. In this brief, we consider the current conditions in China's real estate and construction sector and how a possible sectoral crisis could spread to the national economy and the euro area. While the direct financial impacts on the euro area's financial sector is likely to be minor, China's real estate sector problems could spill over widely into the domestic real economy and thereby increase uncertainty internationally. In such case, the indirect impacts on the euro area could be severe.

Kiinassa kiinteistösektori ja rakentaminen toimivat talouskasvun vetureina viime vuosikymmenellä ja niiden merkitys taloudelle kasvoi poikkeuksellisen suureksi. Kasvu oli kuitenkin erittäin velkavetoista ja etenkin rakentajien velkatasot nousivat korkeiksi. Kun viranomaiset kiristivät sektorin rahahanoja viime vuonna ja asuntomarkkinat viilenivät, rakentajien maksuhäiriöt lisääntyivät syksyllä 2021 ja ongelmat nousivat pintaan. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme Kiinan kiinteistösektorin ja rakentamisen merkitystä Kiinan taloudelle, nykytilannetta ja sitä, miten sektorin mahdollinen kriisiytyminen vaikuttaisi maan talouteen ja mitä se merkitsisi euroalueen kasvulle. Suorat vaikutukset rahoitussektorin kautta näyttävät euroalueen osalta vähäisiltä. Jos kiinteistösektorin ongelmat leviäisivät Kiinassa laajemmin reaalitalouteen ja epävarmuus kasvaisi maan ulkopuolella, vaikutukset myös euroalueelle olisivat selvästi isommat.

China is by far the world's largest consumer of primary energy. Its vast energy demands are a leading issue for global energy use, driving pollution trends and prices on commodity markets. Despite huge increases in non-fossil capacity from nuclear and renewables, China still burns tremendous amounts of coal to meet its primary energy needs. Domestic energy consumption has risen faster than energy production, and thereby increased China's dependence on energy imports. China is the world's largest polluter, so any effort on the country's part towards cleaner energy has major implications for global decarbonisation efforts. This overview comprises ten briefs on China's energy sector. They cover recent developments in energy use and the shifting dynamics in primary power generation aimed at meeting China's energy needs.

We study the credit channel of Chinese monetary policy in a structural vector autoregressive framework. Using combinations of zero and sign restrictions, we identify monetary policy shocks linked to supply and demand responses in the loan market. Our results show that policy shocks coinciding with loan supply effects account for roughly 10 percent of output dynamics after two years, while loan demand effects represent up to 7 percent of output dynamics depending on the policy measure. The credit channel thus constitutes an important and economically relevant transmission channel for monetary policy in China. Monetary policy in China also accounts for a relatively high share of business cycle dynamics.

We estimate several monetary policy rules for Russia for the period 2003–2015. We find that the traditional Taylor rule describes the conduct of monetary policy in Russia reasonably well, whether coefficients are restricted to being the same or allowed to change over the sample period. We find that the Bank of Russia often overshot its inflation target and that extensive overshooting is associated with large depreciations of the ruble, testifying to the importance of the exchange rate in the conduct of monetary policy in Russia.

​This paper focuses on monetary policy in China. A set of different specifications for the monetary policy reaction function are empirically evaluated using monthly data for 1999––2012. Variation is allowed both in the policy targets as well as in the monetary policy instrument itself. Overall, the performance of the estimated policy rules is surprisingly good. Chinese monetary policy displays countercyclical reactions to in‡ation and leaning-against-the-wind behaviour. The paper shows that there is a notable increase in the overall responsiveness of Chinese monetary policy over the course of the estimation period. The central bank interest rate is irresponsive to economic conditions during the earlier years of the sample but does respond in the later years. This finding supports the view that the monetary policy settings of the People's Bank of China have come to place more weight on price-based instruments. A time-varying estimation procedure suggests that the two monetary policy objectives are assigned to different instruments. The money supply instrument is utilised to control the price level and (after 2008) the interest rate instrument has been used to achieve the targeted output growth.

This paper examines how reserve requirements influence the transmission of monetary policy through the bank lending channel in China while also taking into account the role of bank ownership. The implementation of Chinese monetary policy is characterized by the reliance on the reserve requirements as a regular policy tool with frequent adjustments. Using a large dataset of 170 Chinese banks for the period 2004–2013, we analyze the reaction of loan supply to changes in reserve requirements. We find no evidence of the bank lending channel through the use of reserve requirements. We observe, nonetheless, that changes in reserve requirements influence loan growth of banks. The same findings hold true for other monetary policy instruments. Further, we show that the bank ownership format influences transmission of monetary policy.

We construct a small-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that features price rigidities, habit formation in consumption and costs in capital adjustment, and calibrate the model with data for the Chinese economy. Our interest centers on the impact of technology and monetary policy shocks for different structures of the Chinese economy. In particular, we evaluate how a rebalancing of the economy from investment-led to consumption-led growth would affect the economic dynamics after a shock occurs. Our findings suggest that a rebalancing would reduce the volatility of the real economy in the event of a technology shock, which provides support for policies aiming to increase the consumption share in China.

This paper evaluates the usefulness of a McCallum monetary policy rule based on money supply for maintaining price stability in mainland China. We examine whether excess money relative to rulebased values provides information that improves the forecasting of price developments. The results suggest that our monetary variable helps in predicting both consumer and corporate goods price inflation, but the results for consumer prices depend on the forecasting period. Nevertheless, growth of the Chinese monetary base has tracked the McCallum rule quite closely. Moreover, results using a structural vector autoregression suggest that our measure of excess money supply could be used to identify monetary policy shocks in the Chinese economy