Asian Unemployment

Been away for a long while. Currently in China interning. Which makes the following story that much more interesting:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100819262

It's not an earth-shattering article. Youth unemployment is awful throughout the world (this applies to myself). However, this quote piqued my interest:

"The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person," said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

It's pretty indicative of the state of the Chinese economy moreso than the global economy. Though in the immediate-term, we can probably explain this specific instance with global economic weakness, China's economic and social policy-set are rearing the "negative consequences" side of government intervention. It's a complex system made more complex by policy. Here, China has attempted to graduate and educate as many people as possible (though the quality of many graduates is... dubious), which on the whole, is good! (The US should really get on that one...) However, it seems like the combination of, well, the fact that China has so many people, has translated to way, way too many graduates, and the economy simply hasn't caught up to the fact. This goes along with the mismatch of way too much investment spending, out of consumers and export buyers, resulting in empty factories and apartments... 

This is not to say the Chinese government shouldn't have done all these things. But China has reached a "balancing point" on many of its policies. The obvious one is the need to shift from an investment-spending based economy to a consumer-spending based economy, but other policies, like education or population control (China's population is set to shrink some time before 2050, I forget the last date) need to be rebalanced. Unfortunately, it seems like whenever you change anything in China, it's just like the US, someone gets pissed off. The only difference is that in China it's behind closed doors, while I'm America it's some guy(s) who yell really loud.