Yang Bai is a PhD student in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the bidirectional relationship between financialisation and deindustrialisation in South Africa and China. She investigates how financial expansion interacts with industrial decline, and how this relationship differs across sectors, particularly between manufacturing and mining.

Yang holds an MSc in Emerging Economies and International Development from King’s College London and a BA in Economics from Durham University. Alongside her PhD, she works as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches Behavioural Economics, Mathematics and Foundations of Economics. She has previous experience in financial management and analysis in China, where she contributed to corporate financial strategies and operations.

In 2025, she was awarded the Mark Hayes Prize for the outstanding paper presented at the 16th Annual PKES Post-Keynesian Economics Society Conference, in recognition of her contribution to advancing Post-Keynesian and heterodox economics.

Research

Thesis title: 'Financialisation and (de-)industrialisation in South Africa and China: Exploring the bidirectional loop'

Yang’s research examines how financialisation and deindustrialisation influence each other over time. She analyses the structural links between financial expansion and industrial decline using sector-level panel data from South Africa and China, while also considering the possibility that deindustrialisation feeds back into financialisation. Her findings suggest that the strength and direction of these relationships depend on sectoral characteristics, with the mining sector being more exposed to financial pressures than manufacturing.

PhD supervision

• Primary supervisor: Dr Ewa Karwowski
• Secondary supervisor: Dr Juan Grigera

Further details

See Yang's research profile