China is both a major trading partner of the United States and the largest official holder of U.S. assets in the world. The value of Chinese foreign exchange reserves peaked at just over $4 trillion in June 2014 but has since declined to $3.19 trillion (as of August 2016).
In the mid-2000s, household private debt reached a new level 1.2 times larger than personal income— before collapsing during the Great Recession. This paper uses microeconomic data to document the main changes in personal debt and explore the behavior of debt across generations over two periods: before and after the Great Recession.
The authors apply the analysis of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to assess the degree of resource misallocation in the Republic of Korea manufacturing sector from 1982 to 2007. They find improvement in the aggregate allocative efficiency during the first decade and a strong reversal after 1992.
Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement: The number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction for public highways barely budged.