Short-Term Non-OECD Demand Trends

Extrapolating China's Oil Consumption

Chinese Urbanization in Context

Did China's Oil Consumption Decline 4% in 2011?

Urban Job Growth in China

Is the Chinese Construction Industry Too Large?

Cement Production: China and Elsewhere

One Way the US is like the PIIGS

Chinese Property Prices

Chinese PMI

Can we Grow the Economy Any More?

Kevin Drum had an interesting post yesterday in which he collected a list of theories for why it's difficult to grow the economy any more:

1. The basic Rogoff/Reinhart observation that financial collapses due to asset bubbles just take a long time to work through. Given the size of the 2008 collapse, historical evidence suggests that it's going to take five or six years to recover, and that's that.
2. The Tyler Cowen "Great Stagnation" hypothesis. We've picked through all the low-hanging economic fruit over the past century, and like it or not, we're now entering an extended period of low productivity growth because we're not inventing lots of cool new stuff.
3. The related (I think) investment drought hypothesis. Ben Bernanke famously ascribed the housing bubble partly to a "savings glut" from overseas, and the flip side of that is an investment drought. The reason financial assets became so popular is that, even with all that money sloshing around the system, there simply weren't very many high-quality investment opportunities available in firms that make real-world goods and services, and that hasn't changed.
4. The peak oil theory. Production of oil has pretty much maxed out, which means that every time the economy gets moving it will create a spike in oil prices, which will send the global economy back into recession. We're now in a continual oil-fueled boom/bust cycle that limits our long-term growth rate.
5. The Michael Mandel contention that increased consumption simply leaks out of the economy to China and other countries. Stimulating consumption in the U.S. just won't do much for the American economy if all those extra dollars mostly get spent on overseas goods and services.
6. Various structural explanations that suggest the United States has an increasing number of workers who flatly don't have the skills to do anything useful in the modern economy — a problem that was temporarily masked by the housing bubble and was only fully exposed when the economy collapsed. This takes various forms, both weak (workers can be retrained but it will take a while) and strong (forget it, they're simply useless).
7. The self-serving group of partisan hack theories: regulatory uncertainty is the real problem, taxes are too high, the EPA is strangling America, hyperinflation is just around the corner, markets are cowering in fear of future deficits, etc. etc.

Of these, I subscribe to versions of 1, 4, 5, and 6.  But let me comment first on the ones I don't agree with.

Chinese Inflation

Chinese vs US Vehicle Fleets

Chinese Expressways vs US Interstates

The above graph compares the size of the US Interstate highway system (according to FHWA Table HM 220), with the Chinese Expressway system (according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics Table 16-4).  Both series currently run through 2009.  The notional extrapolation shown as the thin pink line suggests that the Chinese system will exceed the length of the US system sometime this year.  We won't know for sure until 2013.

Of all the different ways that China is overtaking the US, this seems like it might be a particularly psychologically significant one to Americans.

US Manufacturing Employment

Chinese Inflation, and Next Recession Musings

Cardiovascular Disease Burden Around the World

Life Expectancy around the World

Evolution of Animal Consumption with Wealth

Will China Slow Down by 2015?