There has been a recent research stating that, among the components of Term Spread that are widely recognized in the academic world as having a superior predictive power for the economy when compared to other leading variables, the predictability of “expected short-term interest rate” has decreased dramatically and the predictive power of “term premium” has expanded especially in countries that adopted with low-interest policy such as United States. In this context, the purpose of this study is to analyze whether the same phenomenon is happening in China by conducting various experiments. The experiment was divided into intra-sample prediction and out of sample prediction. In the intra-sample prediction, two factors “rate of change GDP” and “recession” were set as dependent variables and empirical analysis was conducted on each. When the rate of change of GDP was the dependent variable, the predictive power of Term Spread mainly stemmed from the “expected part of future short-term interest rate”, and this trend does not show a decreasing trend later in the rolling test results but term premium appeared to act as noise. Interesting results were obtained when recession was used as a dependent variable. It was observed that although Term Spread gives a statistically significant signal to the recession, the explanatory power is significantly less than when using the “expected short-term interest rate”, “term premium”, “future short-term interest rate” + “term premium”. In addition, the significance of “expected part of future short-term interest rate” is very robust, exceeding the threshold of 2 in both the backward and forward rolling regression analysis. Therefore, it could be confirmed the predictive power of Term Spread in China still depends heavily on the “expected short-term interest rate”, and that the recent phenomenon that was observed in the US was not happening in China.
