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Since the late 1990s, China's investment share of gross domestic product (GDP) has increased while the corresponding shares for consumption and both labor and household income have declined. (This decline can be seen in figure 1, titled "China's trend patterns in the last two decades," on this site.) These changes in trends have been accompanied by sharp changes in cyclical patterns as well. (Figure 2 on the same website depicts these correlations with a 10-year moving window.) The strong positive correlation between investment and household consumption broke down in the late 1990s. The model laid out in "Trends and Cycles in China's MacroeconomyOff-site link," by Chun Chang, Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha, can account for these facts. The authors argue that these changes began in March 1996, when the Eighth National People's Congress passed a historic long-term plan to adjust the industrial structure for the next 15 years in favor of strengthening heavy industries. Preferential credit policies to heavy industries—where local governments have made implicit guarantees of long-term bank loans to that sector—have crowded out short-term loans to smaller firms. Consistent with this crowding-out effect, the chart entitled "New Bank Loans to Nonfinancial Enterprises as a Percent of GDP" shows that the correlation between short-term loans and medium- and long-term loans as shares of GDP has been negative since the early 1990s.

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