How China escaped the poverty trap
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
How China escaped the poverty trap
(Cornell studies in political economy / edited by Peter J. Katzenstein)
Cornell University Press, 2016
Available at 12 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-314) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE
"BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS
WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
"How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences."
Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee
Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise.
How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth."
Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.
Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"-top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials.
Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"-harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms.
Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.
Table of Contents
Introduction: How Did Development Actually Happen?
Part 1 FRAMEWORK AND BUILDING BLOCKS
1. Mapping Coevolution
2. Directed Improvisation
Part 2 DIRECTION
3. Balancing Variety and Uniformity
4. Franchising the Bureaucracy
Part 3 IMPROVISATION
5. From Building to Preserving Markets
6. Connecting First Movers and Laggards
Conclusion: How Development Actually Happened Beyond China
Appendix A: Steps for Mapping Coevolution
Appendix B: Interviews
by "Nielsen BookData"