You know the China story. Population? Huge. Economy? Very huge. Trade surpluses? Really huge. Maybe too huge. Even as China floods the world’s markets with electronics, electric cars, and other high-tech goods, its own domestic demand for most products remains stubbornly weak. Retail sales are low. Oversupply of products is rampant. The country’s producer price index has been negative for three years. One culprit? What economists are now calling “involution”: fierce corporate competition for market share that simply drives prices lower and lower. A race to the bottom, basically, which also then hurts companies in all the countries that China exports to. And involution can cause some weird distortions, as Yanmei Xie, senior associate fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, told the FT’s Soumaya Keynes on the latest episode of The Economics Show.

Full report : Will Chinese ‘involution’ do to robots and AI what it’s already done to EVs?