Understanding china's economic performance

By J. Sachs, W. Woo. 2001

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978: the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. Specifically, the resulting non-capitalist institutions are claimed to be successful in (a) agriculture where land is not owned by the fanners; (b) township and village enterprises (TVEs) which are owned collectively by rural communities; and (c) state owned enterprises (SOEs) where increased competition and increased wage incentive, but not privatization, have been emphasized. The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation for the rapid growth. China had a high population density heavily concentrated in low-wage agriculture, a condition that was favorable for labor-intensive export-led growth in other parts of East Asia. The convergence school also holds that China's gradualism results primarily from a lack of consensus over the proper course, with power still divided between market reformers and old-style socialists; and that the “innovative” non-capitalist institutions are responses to China's political circumstances and not to its economic circumstances. Perhaps the best test of the two approaches is whether China's policy choices are in fact leading to institutions harmonized with normal market economies or to more distinctive innovations. In this regard, the recent policy trend has been towards institutional harmonization rather than institutional innovation, suggesting that the government accepts that the ingredients for a dynamic market economy are already well-known.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/391ed1ece1ed1552fc0f103bd227e5c80136c060

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In Gender Studies

1. Angang Hu
2. Xiaolan Fu
3. Jinghai Zheng
4. W. Chu

In Political Science and International Relations

1. A. Bigsten
2. Angang Hu
3. Xiaolan Fu
4. Franklin Allen
5. Jinghai Zheng
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In Sociology and Political Science

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2. Angang Hu
3. Meijun Qian
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7. J. Qian
8. W. Chu

Citations in the corpus

• Township and Village Enterprises in China (2003, background): “Ownership at the local government level may not be entirely without the sort of problems posed by central government ownership [Sachs and Woo, 1997].”
• From “Hindu Growth” to Productivity Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition (2004, unknown): “24Sachs and Woo (1997) argue that this drag was important in explaining the differential performance of China and the East European countries in the wake of liberalization.”
• How the Chinese government promoted a global automobile industry (2011, background): “The discussion in this section derives much from Thun (2006). (35)See Zhao (2000: 122).”
• Law, Finance, and Economic Growth in China (2005, background): “As long as the economy maintains its strong growth momentum so that the government’s taxable income also increases (e.g., Sachs and Woo, 1997; Rawski, 2002), the government can always assume the remainder of 8 One potential risk for using foreign reserves is the pressure of significant RMB…”
• An Empirical Analysis of Provincial Productivity in China (1979–2001) (2006, background): “Sachs & Woo (1997) made a similar point and their estimates show that China’s broad growth performance is in line with the performance of other East Asian economies.”
• A Model of China's State Capitalism (2015, unknown): “After China s historical decision on reform and opening up in 1978, the central government has taken a gradual, experimental, and pragmatic approach of crossing the river by touching stones to reform SOEs (see, e.g., Qian (1996), Lin, Cai and Zhou (1999), Sachs and Woo (2000), and Xu (2011)).”
• Can China´s Growth be Sustained? A Productivity Perspective (2008, background): “One school of thought on the interpretation of Chinese reform is that China has achieved the greatest success in precisely the areas where market reforms have gone the furthest (Sachs & Woo, 2000).”