James Heckman is the Henry Schultz distinguished service professor of economics and public policy and director of the Centre for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago.
Heckman has devoted his professional life to understanding the origins of major social and economic questions related to inequality, social mobility, discrimination and the formation of skills and regulation in labour markets. He has also done extensive research in China’s labour market and early childhood development.
He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for developing methods to solve statistical sample-selection problems.
This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
What is your assessment of China’s economic outlook, especially as it grapples with geopolitical tensions in different parts of the world?
The whole world’s economic outlook isn’t good right now because of the fighting in the Middle East and the rise in oil prices and the uncertainty that all of this has created. Right now, in a period of uncertainty, China and the rest of the world is a little bit on pause.
And I say “a little bit” because we are in the initial phases of a great bout of uncertainty before things are really resolved. The typical reaction of most trading partners and most human beings is to hold off and to wait until things get resolved.
