Cameron Hepburn

Strong, sustainable and inclusive growth in a new era for China

Cameron Hepburn, Nicholas Stern, Chunping Xie and Dimitri Zenghelis, “Strong, sustainable and inclusive growth in a new
era for China”, Paper 1: Challenges and ways forward (April 2020) Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science


This is the first of two ‘policy insight’ papers that offer an outline of strategies and policies for an innovative, sustainable and low-carbon approach to China’s development. They are intended to inform decision-making for China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025). The two papers were originally prepared before the Covid-19 outbreak; the pandemic has changed the situation in many important ways, inside and outside China. The fundamentals of the medium-to long-term analyses of these papers have not changed. However, the short term is very different and it will be important to integrate, both in China and the world, the recovery from the Covid-19 crisis with the transformation of the economy embodied in the transition to a low and zero-carbon world.
The world economy is now at risk, with the prospect of a strong contraction in both demand and supply this year. Global supply chains are facing severe challenges as many countries have imposed social quarantine, lockdowns and travel bans. In response to the crisis we must ensure that lessons from the 2008 financial crash are learned: the recovery from that crash did not embody strong enough priorities for sustainability and there was a rapid relapse into austerity in a number of countries.