<i>&gt;The author draws this conclusion from the findings of one OECD paper, so take that with a grain of salt.</i><p>Actually he cites two papers on that difference, but I wonder whether the outsized weight of China for the global economy and in all these statistics makes any conclusions drawn from past episodes even relevant.<p>Much of the corporate debt in many parts of the world was used for building production capacity meant to supply China. If all of that has to be written down, things could get pretty ugly.<p>I recently read somewhere (I believe on Bloomberg) that 90% of the value of all mergers and acquisitions in the resource sector since 2007 were already written down. That is a terrible testament to management quality in my view.