About China Finance and Economic Review

China Finance and Economic Review

Overview and identity

China Finance and Economic Review is an English-language economics journal published by De Gruyter (Walter de Gruyter GmbH) in Germany, rooted in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. It carries the print ISSN 2095-4638 and the online ISSN 2196-5633, and its abbreviated title is China Fin. Econ. Rev. The journal began publication with De Gruyter in 2013 and is the English edition of a CASS finance-and-economics research title whose Chinese masthead is 中国财政与经济研究. It publishes research on Chinese public finance, fiscal policy, macroeconomics, finance and economic reform, written in English so that the work of Chinese economics institutes can be read directly by scholars abroad. Scopus coverage recorded for the journal runs from 2013 to 2024, and De Gruyter's bibliographic services list its volumes through the same period, with the journal's editor recorded as He Dexu.

Not to be confused: three similarly named journals

The journal's name invites confusion with two other titles, and distinguishing them is essential for readers and librarians. China Economic Review is a separate, long-established Elsevier journal with ISSN 1043-951X, publishing many volumes a year on the Chinese economy; it has no connection to the De Gruyter title beyond a similar name. China Finance Review International is a third journal, published by Emerald with ISSN 2044-1398, focused on financial economics and China's capital markets. China Finance and Economic Review, by contrast, is the CASS-rooted De Gruyter journal with print ISSN 2095-4638, distinguished by its emphasis on public finance and fiscal questions and by its origin as the English edition of a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences periodical. Checking the ISSN is the reliable way to tell the three apart in catalogues and citation databases.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences root

The journal's contributing authors are drawn from institutes of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, including its National Academy of Economic Strategy. CASS is China's national academy for the social sciences, and its economics institutes produce a large share of the policy-oriented research on Chinese public finance, fiscal reform and macroeconomic management published inside China. China Finance and Economic Review was created to carry a selection of that research into English. Articles in the journal characteristically address questions as they arise in Chinese policy debate — the sustainability of public finances, the structure of intergovernmental fiscal relations, local government debt, housing cycles, digital finance — and present them, with Chinese data and institutional detail, to an international readership that would otherwise encounter this work only in summary or translation fragments.

Editor He Dexu

The journal's editor, He Dexu, is a senior figure in CASS economics. Bibliographic records for his Springer volume Chinese Finance Policy for a New Era describe him as president and researcher of the National Academy of Economic Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, professor and doctoral supervisor at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, executive director of the China Finance Society and vice president of the China Rural Finance Society. His own research concerns China's financial system and financial security; his English-language monograph Financial Security in China: Situation Analysis and System Design examines the impact of the global financial crisis on China's financial security, currency risks, bank credit behaviour, stock-market and insurance risks, shadow banking and real-estate finance. He has also published in the journal itself, including work with Wang Chaoyang on the risks and causes of the financial sector's high growth in China and, with Feng Ming, on China's fiscal and financial policy questions.

Scope: public finance and fiscal policy at the centre

Public finance is the journal's centre of gravity. Its volumes include studies of fiscal sustainability and the fiscal response to epidemic shocks, the construction of an index of China's fiscal policy uncertainty, a seventy-year retrospective on China's fiscal policy by Yang Zhiyong, analyses of local government debt governance across seven decades, and work on intergovernmental vertical fiscal relations reform and grassroots government finance. This concentration reflects the journal's Chinese parent title, whose masthead joins finance (财政) with economic research, and the research programmes of the CASS institutes that supply its authors. For international readers, the journal functions as a source on how Chinese fiscal institutions — central-local revenue sharing, local government financing, fiscal transfers — are analysed by economists working inside the country's leading social-science academy.

Scope: finance, macroeconomics and reform

Around that fiscal core, the journal publishes on finance and macroeconomic reform. Recorded article topics include how digital finance promotes household consumption, financing constraints and firms' choice between cross-border mergers and greenfield investment for outward foreign direct investment, the development of pilot free trade zones and regional economic growth, the Chinese housing boom revisited, administrative hierarchy and the size growth of cities, the transfer of China's manufacturing under global industrial layout adjustment, credit spreads and default probability for prefecture-level governments, and the effects of rising labour costs on China's industrialisation. The range is that of a general Chinese-economics journal with a finance-and-fiscal accent: growth, trade, urbanisation and industrial change appear alongside debt, banking and fiscal risk, treated with Chinese micro and macro data.

Publication record and volumes

De Gruyter published the journal in quarterly volumes. The RePEc and EconPapers bibliographic records, maintained with data from De Gruyter, document the journal's contents volume by volume: volume 5 appeared in 2016, volume 6 in 2017, volume 7 in 2018, volume 8 in 2019 and volume 9 in 2020, each with four issues. Issue contents are indexed article by article in those services, with page ranges and author names, making the journal's output traceable in standard economics bibliography. A notable example is volume 9, issue 4 (2020), which gathered work on fiscal sustainability, digital finance and consumption, outward investment, free trade zones, housing and city growth — a cross-section of the journal's concerns in a single issue. Indexing services record the journal's active publication span with De Gruyter from 2013, and Scopus/Scimago coverage from 2013 to 2024.

Indexing, metrics and classification

In SCImago's classification the journal falls under Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous), in the third quartile (Q3). SciJournal's database, drawing on Journal Citation Reports and SCImago data, reports a 2025 two-year impact factor of 1.19 for the journal, up from 0.67 in 2024, an SJR of 0.387 and an h-index of 14. These are modest figures beside large commercial economics journals, and they fit the journal's character: it is a translated-edition bridge journal whose value lies less in citation volume than in the provenance of its contents — research from CASS institutes, in English, through an established European academic publisher. Citation-style guides list the journal with its online ISSN 2196-5633 and its De Gruyter citation format, reflecting its use in economics writing internationally.

Why a translated edition matters

China Finance and Economic Review belongs to a recognisable publishing form: the English edition of a Chinese institute journal. Chinese social-science research is produced in very large volume but published overwhelmingly in Chinese, which limits its direct use abroad; foreign scholars often learn of Chinese fiscal and financial debates at second hand. An English edition edited within the originating academy and published by De Gruyter — a German academic publisher with long experience of journal publishing — shortens that distance. Readers gain primary access to the arguments, data and institutional knowledge of CASS economists on subjects such as local government debt and fiscal reform, where insider institutional detail is precisely what outside analysts lack. The journal's Chinese masthead, 中国财政与经济研究, printed alongside its English title, marks that dual identity: a Chinese research periodical presented to the world in English.

Readership and significance

The journal's natural readers are economists, political economists and policy analysts working on China, graduate students seeking English-language access to CASS research, and librarians building collections on Chinese public finance. Its significance is documentary as much as citational: its volumes preserve, in English, a record of how China's leading social-science academy analysed the country's fiscal system, financial risks and economic reforms across the 2010s and into the 2020s — from local government debt and housing to digital finance and free trade zones. For anyone tracing the development of Chinese economic policy thinking, China Finance and Economic Review, print ISSN 2095-4638, online ISSN 2196-5633, edited by He Dexu and published by De Gruyter, is a primary source with few equivalents.