The U.K. is the only country with a bilateral stimulus check agreement with China, a move that critics argue is a waste of money.
As part of a $3.5 trillion stimulus package signed into law in December, the U-K.
agreed to allow China to issue stimulus checks to companies that hire Americans.
The program has come under fire by some in the U.-K., who claim it is too generous to companies with low foreign labor costs.
“The U.KS. will not get a fair shake,” said James McBride, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In a new study, McBride and his co-authors argue that China’s “overwhelming” foreign labor force has contributed to U.k. economic stagnation, while China’s large and expanding domestic labor force and a relatively low level of investment have also helped bolster the economy.
“[The] stimulus checks, which were meant to incentivize firms to hire U. K. citizens, instead encourage firms to create foreign-born workers, which in turn will depress U. k. wages,” McBride said.
China’s $3 billion stimulus check, issued in the first month of 2017, has helped boost U. s. exports by 1.3 percent in the last year, the report said.
China’s economy grew at an annualized 3.6 percent last year and is expected to grow 4.4 percent this year.
According to the authors of the CSIS report, U. ls. foreign labor-force participation rate was 58.7 percent in 2015, compared to 69.5 percent in China, which had a labor force of over 30 million in 2015.
At a minimum, China should allow stimulus checks for U.s. firms to attract foreign talent, and should allow the Chinese government to allocate funds directly to U- ks industries, the authors argue.
Instead, the stimulus checks have “further widened the gap between the U s and China,” McBrien said.
The U-S.
has been buying billions of dollars of Chinese imports since 2010 and has been relying on Chinese labor force to help support U.ks. manufacturing, the economists argue.
China imports about 70 percent of U. S. manufactured goods, including textiles, consumer goods, food, and chemicals.
In the past year, China has built a $20 billion steel plant, a $10 billion fiber optic cable, and the country’s largest solar project.
China has also become more competitive in the global race to manufacture electronics and automobiles.
China’s “massive” investment in U. ny industries has resulted in more manufacturing jobs and lower prices, the CSES study said.
In the past two years, China increased its trade surplus with the U ks to $3 trillion.
However, the Chinese economy has been shrinking for the past decade, and its manufacturing has been declining, according to the CSII.
It has been growing at a slow pace for the last three years, but China has been unable to sustain its growth due to its huge trade deficit, low government spending, and high debt, McBriere said.
In the meantime, the United States has been forced to rely on the Chinese to fill jobs lost due to the Great Recession, McBrains authors said.
“It’s a situation that is beyond repair,” McBrants said.