According to Maital, to avoid the middle-income trap, China will need to raise its "total factor productivity", which demands innovation, working smart, new ideas and improvements, not more use of resources.
SHEEP AND GOATS
China plans to take another 70 million people out of poverty in the next five years.
Visiting Shenshan, a village in Jiangxi Province, early in February, President Xi Jinping said, "Not a single family living in poverty is to be left behind on our path to ending poverty."
Villager Zhang Chengde, 63, doubled his income to about 8,000 yuan (1,200 U.S. dollars) last year by raising goats thanks to kids given as part of a poverty reduction campaign.
Zhang's son is 29 years old and remains a bachelor, partly due to poverty. He will not seek a job in cities this year, believing that helping his father expand the size of their herd will be more rewarding.
PATH AND METHODS
According to the proposal on the 13th Five-Year Plan, the quality of free trade zones (FTZ) will be improved and more FTZs set up.
Besides the four in the Shanghai, Tianjin, Fujian and Guangdong, all prosperous, coastal localities, a number of other provinces have unveiled FTZ applications.
Liaoning Province in the northeast, said in its provincial 13th Five-Year Plan it will seek the approval for an FTZ in its port city of Dalian. The economy in Liaoning, part of the old industrial belt, only expanded 3 percent, the slowest at the provincial level, in 2015.
The interaction of the FTZs, the Belt and Road Initiative, the integration of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, among other strategies, will help produce a more balanced development and reshape the opening up policy.
The "two sessions" will show how China perceives its path and the methods it will use to handle the challenges ahead. New governance concepts and strategies will also be widely illustrated across all agendas at the sessions this year.
China's shift from a low-wage manufacturing economy driven by exports and infrastructure investment to a medium-wage economy driven by services and consumption, is mainly driven by the growing middle class, said Maital.
"Global businesses are aware of China's huge and growing market and the new middle class. They are aware that China is one of the few markets in the world that are growing strongly," said the Israeli academic.
