Regularized National Congresses and Political Business Cycle: Institutionalized Economic Volatility in China

This study investigates China's institution-based political business cycle (PBC) by examining the regular five-year conventions of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China (NCCPC) and the National People's Congress (NPC). Matching provincial economic data with leader biographies over three decades, we estimate the PBC effect of approximately $0.9\%$ during these event years. Exploiting provincial growth variations under leaders with different attributes, we find a strong, investment-driven upswing in GDP growth in coastal provinces. These PBC patterns are not determined by leadership turnovers but instead vary with incumbent characteristics. We argue that the institutionalization of elite politics—through regular promotion and retirement windows—structures bureaucratic competition and anchors expectations, producing the observed PBC. The extent to which the breaking of institutional norms at the $20^{th}$ NCCPC may have destabilized this pattern warrants future assessment. This page contains the data and programming codes used to conduct this analysis.