Since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, Wenzhou City of China's Zhejiang Province has witnessed large-scale institutional change and rapid economic development. This book studies the institutional change and economic development in Wenzhou since China's reform and opening-up. It concludes that the most important characteristic of Wenzhou model is that the city is the first to promote industrialization and urbanization by privatization and marketization in Zhejiang. As privatization and marketization reflect reform, and industrialization and urbanization represent development, Wenzhou model promotes development through economic reform. In the early years of the reform and opening-up, the people of Wenzhou boldly faced the constraints of traditional planned economy, bravely explored the market-oriented reform and opened up a new path to regional economic development. This book also contains the stories of the people of Wenzhou.

China has enjoyed unprecedented high economic growth for three decades. This growth has however been unbalanced and has led to some serious consequences which Chinese policy makers are now trying to rectify. One of the consequences is the deterioration of regional disparity which is threatening the stability of the Chinese society and hence the sustainability of current high economic growth in the country. This edited volume on China''s regional development and economic growth is hence timely and contains a collection of the latest research reports in this field. The authors represent a distinguished group of economists in Australia, China, Japan and Vietnam who are actively engaged in research of the Chinese economy. The topics addressed in the chapters cover important regional issues such as inequality, distribution of the creative class, FDI and industrial policies. Specifically, this volume aims to examine selected issues associated with China''s regional development, economic growth and FDI, and China and its neighboring economies. The findings will contribute to current economic policy debates.

In the last two decades, China's western inland region has largely been left out of the nation's economic boom. While its 355-million population accounts for 28% and its land area for 71% of China's total, the region's share of the national GDP is under 20%. Since 1999, Beijing has implemented the West China Development Program to boost the region's growth. To study the major domestic issues and the global implications of this program, the University of Victoria's Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives organized and hosted a multidisciplinary international conference on March 6?8, 2003. This volume of papers presented at the conference offers perspectives on the issues by leading experts of diversified academic disciplines from China, Canada, the US, and other countries.

Regional economic development has attracted the interest of economists, geographers, planners and regional scientists for a long time. And, of course, it is a field that has developed a large practitioner cohort in government and business agencies from the national down to the state and local levels. In planning for cities and regions, both large and small, economic development issues now tend to be integrated into strategic planning processes. For at least the last 50 years, scholars from various disciplines have theorised about the nature of regional economic development, developing a range of models seeking to explain the process of regional economic development, and why it is that regions vary so much in their economic structure and performance and how these aspects of a region can change dramatically over time. Regional scientists in particular have developed a comprehensive tool-kit of methodologies to measure and monitor regional economic characteristics such as industry sectors, employment, income, value of production, investment, and the like, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, and focusing on both static and dynamic analysis. The 'father of regional science', Walter lsard, was the first to put together a comprehensive volume on techniques of regional analysis (Isard 1960), and since then a huge literature has emerged, including the many titles in the series published by Springer in which this book is published.

The Regional Handbooks of Economic Development series provides accessible overviews of countries within their larger domestic and international contexts, focusing on the relations among regions as they meet the challenges of the twenty first century. Like the other titles in the series, the China Handbook explores a wide range of complex factors, including overviews of the region's economic conditions within an historical and political context, as well as 20 or more chapter-length essays written by recognized experts, which analyze the key issues affecting a region's economy: its population, natural resources, foreign trade, labor problems, and economic inequalities, and other vital factors. In addition, this resource offers a detailed chronology of events in the region, a glossary of terms, biographical entries on key personalities, an annotated bibliography of further reading, and a comprehensive analytical index.

County-level fieldwork and unique data demonstrate how leadership and career incentives explain regional variation in China's economic development.

China is a powerful engine of the global economy and the country's rise is undoubtedly the outcome of its protracted campaign of designing and implementing national development strategies since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This book reviews the transformation and innovation of China's economic development strategies, especially Deng Xiaoping's Three-Step strategy and Xi Jinping's internal and external strategies. By introducing the concept of strategic paradigm, it analyzes the theoretical basis of myriads of economic development strategies and predicts China's choice. With the evolutionary process and the outstanding problems in national development planning as the main thread, it discusses the improvement of the national planning system, specifically of the national overall planning system, the regional planning system, the interplay and conflict between regional planning. It also studies the reform of city-county planning system, major function-oriented zones (MFOZs) and planning legislation and institutionalization. It also attempts to put forward proposals to coordinate the interests of planning departments and make different types of planning at different administrative levels compatible.