China's Economic Boom: The Historical Dimension

What insights does history provide on the Chinese economic miracle? Carol H. Shiue and Wolfgang Keller, visiting CESifo until the end of the year, collaborated on a National Science Foundation project from 2005 to 2008 on "What Explains Modern Economic Growth? New Evidence from a Comparison of China and Europe in the 18th Century", that led to numerous co-authored articles on China. Some of these articles were "Shanghai's Trade, China's Growth: Continuity, Recovery, and Change since the Opium Wars", "The Marketing System in Pre-Modern China," and "Markets in China and Europe on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution."

They were also the principal investigators for another National Science Foundation project from 2011 to 2014), on "Trading, Institutions, Product Innovation, and Entrepreneurship".

Both are visiting Munich on research awards from the Humboldt Foundation. Ms Shiue will be working with the Seminar for Economic History at the LMU. Mr Keller, in turn, will be hosted be Gabriel Felbermayr at the Ifo Institute. Professor Shiue is a leading international researcher in the field of economic history of market development and trade in China. Wolfgang Keller works on the interface of international trade and the economics of technology, as well as on issues in growth and long-run development.

Carol H. Shiue is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the International Trade and Investment program (ITI), as well as Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Economic History (EH)/International Trade (IT) programmes. Furthermore Carol H. Shiue is a Research Fellow of the CESifo Research Network. She received her BS in Economics from MIT and her PhD in Economics from Yale University.

Wolfgang Keller is Professor and Director of the McGuire Center for International Economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a Research Fellow of the CESifo Research Network, the NBER, and the CEPR. His previous appointments were at the World Bank, Industry Canada, and the European Central Bank. He also taught at Brown University, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Toronto, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in Koblenz, Germany, he received his MSc from Freiburg University in 1990 and his PhD from Yale University in 1995. Wolfgang Keller lives in the mountains near Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and frequent coauthor, Carol H. Shiue, and their children, Kai (eight) and Mia (three).