30 visiting students from Costa Rica’s INCAE Business School spent a week at CKGSB’s New York office, during an insightful “Specialization in Finance” program, which included lectures, panel discussions and visits to three New York companies – Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg and the New York branch of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China’s largest bank.

The CKGSB EMBA on China Business for Korean Leaders has successfully completed its first module in Beijing under the heading ‘China’s Macro Economy and Big Picture.’ All sessions and programs in the module received enthusiastic feedback from the students due to the extraordinary insight they had gained about China’s latest issues.

The Wall Street Journal’s sister company Dow Jones Newswires publishes a dedicated article on Prof Li Wei’s Business Conditions Index, a monthly survey that takes the pulse of some of China’s leading entrepreneurs and executives.

Liu Ling, a managing director at New China Capital Management, the investment manager for Cathay Funds, told a CKGSB Knowledge Series event that China’s stock-market gyrations are the growing pains of a “healthy and solid” economy, highlighted by China’s middle class overtaking America’s to become the biggest in the world.

Knowledge sharing between Chinese and US scholars in leading business and policy schools produces fascinating discussion as unique partnership continues to bear fruit.

Sun Baohong, the Dean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing at CKGSB, and Carnegie Mellon University business and computer science professor R. Ravi outlined at a CKGSB Knowledge Series event a consumer-centric marketing framework that they said would bump up profit growth and return on investment significantly more than a campaign-centered strategy.

While China’s slowing GDP growth has caused some to sound the alarm, CKGSB Economics Professor Li Wei instead told leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail that there were some positives to the slowdown, not least more affordable housing.

With China’s real estate industry continuing to be one of the hottest topics for discussion, CKGSB and KPMG held a joint breakfast seminar for senior executives of Japanese companies in Beijing. Shedding light on the issue were CKGSB Professor of Economics Li Wei and Tomoyuki Fukumoto, GM, Bank of Japan.

Everyone in the world is concerned about how the Chinese economy is faring and understandably so. China’s linkages with the world mean that the health of the Chinese economy has a bearing on other economies as well. The CKGSB Business Conditions Index, based on a survey conducted each month, gauges business sentiment about the macro-economic environment among successful Chinese business executives. In January, the Index showed that for most relatively successful firms in China, optimism about business conditions over the next six months is waning, and executives are at best cautiously optimistic.

According to the CKGSB Business Conditions Index (BCI), businesses in China remain confident, but it remains unclear if they will continue to. In October 2015, the BCI posted a figure of 54.0, a mild rise over September’s 51.1 and slightly above the confidence threshold of 50. The BCI hit a 14-month high of 61.3 in May 2015 before sliding steadily, with readings from July to September hovering above 50, indicating that the sample firms became less optimistic about business conditions with regard to the following six months. Despite a moderate rally, it is unclear whether the momentum will hold and so companies need to remain cautiously optimistic.

The heady days of double-digit economic growth rates are now history in China, and even achieving 7-7.5% growth is unthinkable. The stock market has been on a roller coaster ride. The Renminbi has fallen dramatically and the trade numbers are down too. Li Wei, Professor of Economics at CKGSB, feels that to solve this China must implement structural reform. The downside: it will be painful. The upside: the Chinese economy will be better off in the long run.

The CKGSB Business Conditions Index shows that companies are expecting the Chinese economy to encounter some difficulties in the coming six months.