It’s just a bit of fun, right? Horoscopes, tea-leaf reading and in China Feng-shui are followed by a large portions of global populations.
The map below from a household survey shows the distribution of Feng-shui believers in China in 2018.
Justin J. Hong and Yuheng Zhao from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Renmin University of China have produced groundbreaking work in the paper highlighted today on administrative bias in Chinese city management caused by Feng-shui beliefs.
Working together with (3) Feng-shui ‘masters’ they’ve compared city mayors’ birth dates with what that’s likely to tell a particular mayor about unpropitious zones in their jurisdiction and then tried to see if these zones have done less well than adjacent neighbors.
‘Bad’ Feng-shui zones, as far as the mayor is concerned, do indeed do worse than control zones. Output is lower, companies located there do worse and populations tend to decrease. When the mayor moves on recovery can take anywhere from between four to six years.
Over the sample period the researchers calculate this effect could have cost China Inc. as much as 0.1% of GDP or roughly U$6bn each year.
You can read the work in full via this link The Costs of Leader Biases.
Happy Sunday.