The Beijing Consensus

There is no doubt China is shaping up to be a dominant player in the world economy and so this introductory article is important to note. What really intrigued me though was this ... "Tsinghua economist Hu Angang, among others, now disdainfully labels GDP growth, the sine qua non of Washington Consensus physics, “black GDP growth.” He takes China’s impressive black GDP numbers and subtracts off the terrific costs of environmental destruction to measure “green GDP growth”. Then Hu nets out China’s corruption costs to measure “clean GDP.” This, he says, is how China should measure progress. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white,” Deng Xiaoing famously observed in one of his early speeches on economic reform. “All that matters is that it catches mice.” But Hu’s GDP tools, which I’ve heard leaders all over the country begin to talk about, reflects the government’s new belief: the color of the cat doesmatter. The goal now is to find a cat that is green, a cat that is transparent."

The labels are helpful, I think, when we are talking about measuring what happens in an economy: snappy and realtively easy. I must admit that I struggle to recall what the greener and more sustainable index is called but green/clean GDP is easier ...

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Beijing Consensus: