Making people happy

Focus of development needs to shift to fairness and the social and environmental impacts of growth

Rapid economic development is transforming China from a low-income to a medium-income nation. Now an influential economy, China is at a crucial stage of industrialization and urbanization and faces many challenges in economic development, such as transforming the nature of economic growth and ensuring its sustainability, tackling unequal income distribution and ensuring the balanced development of economy and society.

Let's look at these challenges in more detail. First, structural problems in China's economic growth model are increasingly apparent and require urgent resolution if the country is to develop sustainably. Investment-led growth has caused a grave imbalance between the roles of consumption and investment, and this continues to worsen. But China no longer has the domestic resources to support that investment-led approach.