Importance of housing market will diminish

Economy | Ed Zhang

For too long, China's housing market hasn't served as a reliable indicator of its overall economy. This shouldn't be the case in a country which is undergoing rapid and, perhaps more complex, demographic change than any other country - around 200 million rural migrants and their families are to be resettled in cities in the next decade.

But press commentators, in China and outside, have seldom discussed how the housing market is related to the rest of the economy, and how housing markets in different cities are related with each other.