Party and state policy documents and China's economy: some macro-level empirical evidence

This paper compares a unique dataset tracking the content of all Central Committee and State Council documents with economic variables in China in the period 2003-2015. After motivating the dataset, two time-series measuring the relative importance of economic issues within the Party and the State are constructed. These two time-series are then compared with measures of China's real economy using a Granger test. The results suggest that past measures of China's economy can better help predict the State Council's future prioritisation of economic issues, but not vice versa. A similar relation is not found for the Central Committee's prioritisation of economic issues. This result is consistent with the view that it is the State that takes a more active role in managing the Chinese economy.