What happens to Japan if China catches a cold?: A causal analysis of Chinese growth and Japanese growth

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the directionality of the dependence between the Chinese economy and the Japanese economy. Taking a probabilistic causal approach, we infer the causal dependence among the Japanese economy and the Chinese economy based on observed data. We find evidence that the Chinese growth has both contemporaneous and temporal causal effects on Japanese growth, though the effect is very small. We did not find any evidence that the Japanese growth might have temporal or contemporaneous causal effect on Chinese growth.