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How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
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About How China Escaped The Poverty Trap
Product Description Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly. Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt. By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions―features that defy norms of good governance―to build markets. Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur. Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today. Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases. Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps. Review WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "Yuen Yuen Ang offers a revisionist theoretical framework that grapples with complexities of institutional adaptation alongside detailed analyses of sub-national variation in development outcomes... her systematic engagement with diverse literatures circumvents disagreement over which came first, democracy or development, to make a field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes... Anyone concerned with institutions,development, or the role of China in the world, should read this elegantly written book." -- Peter Katzenstein Book Prize Committee, for "best book in international relations,comparative politics, or political economy." "The first takeaway of the book, that a poor country can harness the institutions they have and get development going is a liberating message... This provocative message challenges our prevailing practice of assessing a country's institutions by their distance from the global best practice... The second part of the book is equally thought provoking. While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation... this analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level." --Yongmei Zhou (Director of the World Development Report 2017), World Bank Development Blog How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime... Her unconventional insight is that the first challenge of development is to harness 'weak/wrong/bad' institutions to create markets... China wanted to begin a process of "adaptation" and for that they needed to create conditions conducive to "directed improvisation."... Professor Ang is making important advances in understanding how development can be made possible in her approach to Complexity and Development 2.0. -- Lant Pritchett (Harvard Kennedy School), State Capability Blog "Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state--from the center to the periphery, across time and space--has actually practiced (not merely pre
