Over 630 million Chinese escaped poverty since the 1980s, the largest decrease in poverty in history. Studying 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, the authors argue that the engine of China’s economic miracle—private enterprise—did not originate at the top but bubbled up from below, overcoming initial obstacles set up by the government.
This book explores endogenous institutional change and the global, cyclical, and power-based drivers that underpin it. A metatheoretical framework is presented to highlight the influence of path dependence, systemic cycle driven power relations, and institutional design on the development of labor institutions. The framework is applied to the USA, Germany, and China to provide a comparative economic perspective. Systemic Cycle and Institutional Change: Labor Markets in the USA, Germany and China aims to examine endogenous institutional change through analyzing the systemic cycle and bringing together global and national conceptions of capitalism. It is relevant to students and researchers interested in comparative economics, political economy, and labor economics.
Since opening to foreign investment in 1979, China has emerged as the leading investment site for multinational corporations. Remade in China looks beyond the macroeconomic effects of China's investment boom to analyze how foreign investors from the US, Japan, and other nations are shaping China's legal, labor, and business reforms. Wilson draws on interviews with nearly 100 foreign and local managers, attorneys, workers, and members of the business community to explain why Chinese laborers and firms have gravitated toward foreign models, especially US businesses and their institutions. Wilson uses the term "state-guided globalization" to describe how China has used foreign engagement to advance its domestic reform objectives and to enhance its role in international society. Rather than undermining state power, globalization actually has allowed China's state to push through difficult labor and legal reforms. Wilson concludes that Chinese policy makers drew lessons from foreign investors and foreign legal experts on how to introduce difficult labor market reforms in its state-owned enterprises and how to promote rule of law. Remade in China examines globalization and foreign investment in a different light, showing how these developments have helped to chart China's entry into international society. China's WTO accession agreement and international norms have established parameters by which to judge Chinese legal and business reforms. Although China's rise is a grave concern to the world, Remade in China asserts that Chinese leaders now see compliance with international rules as a means to secure more investment and to enhance their international legitimacy. Wilson provides a lucid and insightful analysis of how foreign and domestic actors, from political leaders to average laborers, have contributed to remaking China's institutions.
With $4.5 trillion in total assets, the People’s Bank of China now surpasses the U.S. Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest central bank. The Rise of the People’s Bank of China investigates how this increasingly authoritative institution grew from a Leninist party-state that once jealously guarded control of banking and macroeconomic policy. Relying on interviews with key players, this book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the evolution of the central banking and monetary policy system in reform China. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng trace the bank’s ascent to Beijing’s policy circle, and explore the political and institutional dynamics behind its rise. In the early 1990s, the PBC—benefitting from political patronage and perceptions of its unique professional competency—found itself positioned to help steer the Chinese economy toward a more liberal, market-oriented system. Over the following decades, the PBC has assumed a prominent role in policy deliberations and financial reforms, such as fighting inflation, relaxing China’s exchange rate regime, managing reserves, reforming banking, and internationalizing the renminbi. Today, the People’s Bank of China confronts significant challenges in controlling inflation on the back of runaway growth, but it has established a strong track record in setting policy for both domestic reform and integration into the global economy.
China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.
Varieties of Governance in China examines the origins of the varying institutional foundations of rural China's decentralized governance, explains the performance and change of the formal and informal institutions that uphold rural China's governance, and documents the effects of rural-urban migration on institutional change and local governance in Chinese villages.
This edited volume is based on original essays first presented at seminars in complexity economics, Sichuan University, China, in November 2018 and May 2019, and at the 12th International Conference on the Chinese Economy, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France, in October 2019. It also includes three contributions written especially for this volume. This research benefited from three French grants 'Hubert Curien Research Fellowship' (Program Campus France 2019, 2020, 2021). All chapters assess the recent take-off of the Chinese economy from a historical perspective, enlarging the economic evidence that China's capitalism is a matter of institutional revolution.Institutional Change and China Capitalism aims to provide a radically new view of the rise of Chinese capitalism by drawing on recent developments in cliometrics and complexity economics, macroeconomic dynamics, network analysis and behavioral finance to illustrate the various facets of China's transition to capitalism. The chapters within innovate the study of China's take-off using the frontier of research in institutional cliometrics and complexity economics. Thus, the book is structured in three sections that seek to address — empirically, theoretically, and in terms of network structure, the profound institutional change that led China to progressively adopt capitalism.Together these papers attest to the vitality of current research in cliometrics and complexity economics.
This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. The essays offer a theoretical argument that emphasizes the importance of institutional adaptations as a foundation of communist resilience. In particular, the contributors focus on four adaptations: of the economy, of ideology, of the mechanisms for inclusion of potential rivals, and of the institutions of vertical and horizontal accountability. The volume argues that when regimes are no longer able to implement adaptive change, contingent leadership choices and contagion dynamics make collapse more likely.
Providing an account of the role of informal institutions in Chinese rural development, this book puts forth a distinctive argument on a very important topic in Chinese economic and social affairs. Winner of the 2008 Zhang Peigang Development Economics Award
Since the 1990s, neo-institutionalists have posited that 'institutions matter'. However, they overlook one important issue: the ways institutions change also matters. Numerous academic studies have identified 'good' and 'bad' institutions, but little has been written about effective methods of transforming 'bad' institutions so that they enhance economic performance. To fill this gap, this book reframes the approach of neo-institutional economics to analyze institutions' role and evolution, focusing on the interaction between the household registration (hukou) system evolution and economic transformation.The authors apply an endogenous and dynamic perspective. First, the theory of endogenous institutional change illustrates how the drivers of hukou system evolution differ in the pre-reform and reform eras. Second, the theory of adaptive efficiency evaluates the evolution of the system's institutional efficiency. Finally, the authors were able to test the impact of the hukou reform on urban economic growth by examining local experimentation, helping explain the current 'stickiness' of the system.At the heart of hukou reform lies the question of how to deal with the link between hukou and welfare provision. This book will offer policymakers a better understanding of institutional change in dynamic economic contexts, helping them enhance economic performance.