What are zombie firms?

From 2008 to 2018, China’s nonfinancial corporate debt grew from $4.56 trillion to nearly $20 trillion. The IMF estimates that zombie firms constituted almost one tenth of all nonfinancial corporate debt in China in 2016. To learn more about what zombie firms are and what we can learn from them, we spoke with Tianlei Huang, a research analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.