Unit roots and structural breakpoints in China's macroeconomic and financial time series

摘要

This paper applies unit-root tests to 10 Chinese macroeconomic and financial time series that allow for the possibility of up to two endogenous structural breaks.We found that 6 of the series,i.e.,GDP,GDP per capita,employment,bank credit,deposit liabilities and investment,can be more accurately characterized as a segmented trend stationarity process around one or two structural breakpoints as opposed to a stochastic unit root process.Our findings have important implications for policy-makers to formulate long-term growth strategy and short-run stabilization policies,as well as causality analysis among the series.