TY - BOOK ID - 46272973 TI - How reform worked in China : the transition from plan to market PY - 2017 SN - 0262342723 9780262342728 9780262534246 026253424X 0262342715 PB - Cambridge The MIT Press DB - UniCat KW - Central planning KW - Central-local government relations KW - China KW - Economic policy KW - Federal government KW - Decentralization in government KW - Mixed economy KW - Centralization in government KW - Devolution in government KW - Government centralization KW - Government decentralization KW - Government devolution KW - Political science KW - Local government KW - Public administration KW - Division of powers KW - Federal-provincial relations KW - Federal-state relations KW - Federal systems KW - Federalism KW - Powers, Division of KW - Provincial-federal relations KW - State-federal relations KW - Law and legislation KW - ECONOMICS/Political Economy KW - ECONOMICS/International Economics KW - S06/0223 KW - S10/0250 KW - S10/0251 KW - China: Politics and government--People's Republic: general: since 1976 KW - China: Economics, industry and commerce--General works and economic history: 1976 - 1989 KW - China: Economics, industry and commerce--General works and economic history: since 1989 UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:46272973 AB - As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the "School of Universal Principles," which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the "School of Chinese Characteristics," which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way.The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of "transitional institutions" - not "best practice institutions" but "incentive-compatible institutions" - in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning. ER -