This title was first published in 2000: This work provides a new insight into china's township and village enterprises (TVEs). It views the governance structure of TVEs as effectively combining the comparative advantage of local government officials in external management and of dual firm managers in internal management to overcome imperfections in both market and government during the transitional period. Through extensive field investigation analysis and case studies, this work shows that the governance structure of TVEs has been evolving during the past fifteen years. To adapt to the changing environment, TVEs have continuously innovated firm contractual form from a government official dominant fixed-wage form to a partnership style profit-sharing form, then to a privatization oriented fixed-rent form. This work develops a complete model to explain how the central government’s partial reform efforts in market liberalization have become the driving force to induce the contractual form innovation, and to explicate how heterogeneity in firms’ technical structures and in local economic settings may affect local government’s decisions regarding contractual form innovation. Using the author’s unique data set, the model simulations predict that the development in the whole market system will result in the diffusion of contractual form innovation and lead to an 'induced privatization’ in this sector. The following empirical studies show this to be a powerful prediction and the progress toward such ’induced privatization' can be expected in China in near future. This research work provides a rich empirical study on China’s institutional transition towards a market system. It explains how a bottom-up endogenous, instead of top-down exogenous, property rights reform can be realized in transitional economies. This work will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students in economics, economic development and institutional economics - and especially for those interested in research.

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 title was first published in 2000: This work provides a new insight into china's township and village enterprises (TVEs). It views the governance structure of TVEs as effectively combining the comparative advantage of local government officials in external management and of dual firm managers in internal management to overcome imperfections in both market and government during the transitional period. Through extensive field investigation analysis and case studies, this work shows that the governance structure of TVEs has been evolving during the past fifteen years. To adapt to the changing environment, TVEs have continuously innovated firm contractual form from a government official dominant fixed-wage form to a partnership style profit-sharing form, then to a privatization oriented fixed-rent form. This work develops a complete model to explain how the central government’s partial reform efforts in market liberalization have become the driving force to induce the contractual form innovation, and to explicate how heterogeneity in firms’ technical structures and in local economic settings may affect local government’s decisions regarding contractual form innovation. Using the author’s unique data set, the model simulations predict that the development in the whole market system will result in the diffusion of contractual form innovation and lead to an 'induced privatization’ in this sector. The following empirical studies show this to be a powerful prediction and the progress toward such ’induced privatization' can be expected in China in near future. This research work provides a rich empirical study on China’s institutional transition towards a market system. It explains how a bottom-up endogenous, instead of top-down exogenous, property rights reform can be realized in transitional economies. This work will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students in economics, economic development and institutional economics - and especially for those interested in research.

This collection of papers presented at an international conference in 1987 provides a comprehensive analysis of China's booming rural non-state industrial sector, both collective and private.

The most comprehensive English-language overview of the modern Chinese economy, covering China's economic development since 1949 and post-1978 reforms--from industrial change and agricultural organization to science and technology.

How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.