Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Center for Economics and the Environment: Policy Series

Abstract

This is my second trip here to Lindenwood. I can see the progress that has been made in providing even better facilities for the students in just the year and a half that have elapsed. I appreciate the opportunity to meet again with Lindenwood students and faculty and citizens of St. Charles and St. Louis Counties.

If you ask any nation’s trade officials about trade policy and investment, China will be on the tip of their tongues right now. Everyone is focusing on China. China is the big dragon in the room that is absorbing tremendous amounts of resources: everything from steel and scrap metal to the second largest consumption of energy in the entire world. Prices are rising and shortages are appearing in many resource markets as a result of the rapid growth of the Chinese economy.

The other side of the coin is that most countries are making money by selling to the Chinese. Last year, U.S. sales to China were up twenty-three percent from the previous year. For the first quarter of the year, we are up by twenty-eight percent over the same quarter a year ago.

Missouri has had incredible success in China. In the past four years, sales from Missouri firms have risen by nearly 400 percent. That’s a good clip, especially when the global economy has been slowing down.

China is one of the two big engines of economic growth. (The U.S. economy is the other.) But this does not mean that doing business in China is easy.

Publication Date

2-2005

Included in

Economics Commons

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