"Market Scarcity" and "Incremental Creation"

On March 22, at the China Development High-Level Forum 2026 Annual Meeting titled “China’s 14th Five-Year Plan: High-Quality Development and Co-Creating New Opportunities,” Premier Li Qiang delivered a keynote speech in which he put forward a core assertion with both practical relevance and forward-looking theoretical insight: “The market has become a scarce resource, but it can also be continuously created.” This not only accurately summarizes the current state of the global macroeconomic environment but also offers innovative ideas for China’s high-quality development and for helping the global economy emerge from its downturn.

In the framework of classical economics, scarcity is usually attributed to the physical limitations of traditional production factors such as natural resources, labor, and capital. However, with the evolution of globalization and the widespread advancement of productivity, the “market”—the collective entity of effective demand and trading networks—has undergone a structural shift in its attributes, gradually becoming a key bottleneck that dominates economic cycles. Currently, the “scarcity” of the market mainly stems from the relative contraction of global effective demand and artificially imposed institutional segmentation. After experiencing multiple economic cycles and shocks from geopolitical conflicts, the overall global purchasing power growth has shown diminishing marginal returns, and the markets for traditional manufacturing and bulk consumer goods are approaching saturation. More critically, some economies have adopted unilateral and protectionist measures, fragmenting the once unified global market into regional blocks. From an economic principle perspective, this non-market intervention blocks the free flow of factors, significantly increases institutional transaction costs for cross-border trade, and forces the disruption of supply and demand matching that could have been achieved through comparative advantage, further intensifying the scarcity of “reachable markets.”