A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important. 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.

This clear and accessible text explores Vietnam's successful transition from neo-Stalinist central planning to a market economy—\"Vietnamese style.\" After describing the north Vietnamese system prior to 1975 and its colonial and precolonial antecedents, the authors uncover the mechanisms of that changeover. They contend that the Vietnamese transition was largely bottom-up in character and that it evolved over a long enough period for the country's political economy to adjust. This explains in part the rapid shift to a high-growth, externally oriented development path in the early 1990s, despite the loss of Soviet aid and the lack of significant Western substitutes until 1992-1993. Based upon extensive incountry experience, a wealth of primary materials, and wide comparative knowledge of development issues, the book challenges many preconceived notions, both about Vietnam and about the general nature of transition processes.

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Understanding Economic Transitions explains the genesis, operation, and transformation of the centrally-planned socialist economy, which figured prominently in the lives of billions of people in twentieth-century Europe and Asia. Just as importantly, the centrally-planned socialist economy’s demise coincided with the shift from nonindustrial to industrial economy (and de-industrialization in some cases) and the onset of ICT-driven globalization. Using theory, empirics, and selected country case studies, this book teases out the enduring lessons from the myriad and fraught pathways of transition from socialism to capitalism. Understanding Economic Transitions provides a self-contained, comprehensive, and authoritative treatment of modern economic systems. This textbook has four features of particular use to students: (i) Using the prism of comparative institutionalism, it melds theory and evidence to revisit the varieties of planned and market-driven systems today; (ii) It takes economic planning seriously in theory and practice (central, cooperative, or indicative) as the most prominent marker of the ever-changing boundaries between state and market; (iii) It focuses on the dynamics of systemic transition in formerly socialist countries by contextualizing them in terms of the whence (central planning), the how (modalities of transition), and the whither (illiberal or liberal capitalism) of politico-economic transformation; and (iv) It examines the profound impact on these structural processes of the post-1990 phase of economic globalization. With its clear, comprehensive content and useful pedagogical features, this textbook will prepare students to understand how economies transition and why.

The Regional Economic Integration: A comparative study of Central Asian and South Asian Regions. This book has been acknowledged as an exhaustive research on Economic Integration between Central Asia and South Asian as well as within the regions. This book has given an idea that both the regions are complementary to each other having a lot of potential in all growing sectors. To harness this potential efficiently both the regions should cooperate with each other. Economic benefits might help in diluting some political problems exiting within the regions. War devastating countries by Economic Integration could yield maximum benefits in the European Union then why not these regions could do so. History is witnessed that these regions enjoy same social and culturalties while engaging in trade activities. Author has made extensive efforts to highlight the benefits of economic integration for development and prosperity of both the regions.