From Business Insider’s year in charts roundup, an indication of just how capital-intensive the growth cycle in China has been.
The fashion is to say that this is “too much” investment, but I don’t really see it. Having a low per capital stock of capital goods is more or less what it means to be a poor country. And China is still a poor country, though much less poor than it was fifteen years ago. This super-rapid capital accumulation represents China’s very rapid process of lifting itself out of poverty. It’s a process that will, to be sure, have to come to an end one of these days. But China still has some way to go before catching up with the west.
