Houze Song

Houze Song is a Fellow at MacroPolo, where he leads the think tank’s work on the Chinese economy. He specializes in subnational and regional analysis, having led projects on local government debt, regional economic divergence, infrastructure investment, and labor flows. He has constructed specialized data sets on China’s local government financing vehicles debt and hukou liberalization that provide unique insight into the Chinese political economy.

He also writes “MP Econ,” a Substack research note on the Chinese economy, and publishes a quarterly economic outlook, where he examines secular trends and tests different ideas about the Chinese economy. Houze is also a contributor to the award-winning MacroPolo book “China’s Economic Arrival: Decoding a Disruptive Rise” and has briefed government officials on China’s economic developments. His work is read by market participants and policymakers and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and New York Times.

Previously, Houze was a researcher at the Columbia Global Center (East Asia). Before that, he worked as a research manager at the Unirule Institute, where he assisted the chairman Mao Yushi with research and project management. He holds an MA in quantitative methods and an MPA in international economics, both from Columbia University, and a BA in economics from Peking University.