The rapid growth over the past three decades has been instrumental in lifting over 600 million people in China out of poverty, and people want to know why and how it happened. International evidence has made it clear that a global economy based on current patterns of consumption and production is simply not sustainable. Policymakers have repeatedly been advised that economic growth, poverty reduction, equity, and environment and resource sustainability must be integrated into national development strategies. What about China? The principle limitation of existing China-focused economic studies lies in its imbalances from the perspective of analysis and the impact of growth on poverty and inequality. A limited number of studies are devoted to structural transformation and China’s structural imbalances, social disparities and the impact of science and technology on growth and productivity. This book addresses the alarming environmental consequences of China’s growth patterns within an overall quality growth framework. It contributes to the economic growth and development literature and current policy discourse on China by expanding the policy analysis to include several important new areas using the most recent data available. This includes analyzing the macroeconomic factors that underlie the need for China to advance its economic transformation; examining how social inequalities, including health, education and gender, have evolved and presenting the scale of environmental problems associated with China’s growth miracle. This report represents the first attempt to integrate the issue of environmental sustainability and climate change into the quality growth context, providing readers with a comprehensive account of China’s success and challenges in its three decades of rapid economic growth.

Since 1985, the Chinese government has given high priority to building roads, particularly high-quality roads that connect industrial centers. This report evaluates the contribution roads have made to poverty reduction and economic growth in China over the last two decades. It disaggregates road infrastructure into different classes to account for differences in their quality, and then estimates the impact of road investments on overall economic growth, agricultural growth, urban growth, urban poverty reduction, and rural poverty reduction. The report makes the case for a greater focus on low-quality and rural roads in future infrastructure investment strategies in China. It does so by showing how investing in low-quality and rural roads will generate larger marginal returns, raise more people out of poverty per yuan invested, and reduce regional development disparity more sharply than investing in high-quality roads. The study's findings will have considerable implications for China's infrastructure policy

WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

"Over the past two decades China's growth has been rapid, social indicators have improved, and poverty levels have inched downward. However, widening inequality, increasing resource and financial imbalances, and growing environmental concerns provide China with daunting challenges in improving the quality of growth. The rapid growth that will remain China's principal vehicle for raising standards of living and reducing poverty will derive from urbanization, increased market efficiency, and improvement in the technological capability of Chinese firms. But although growth will be critically important, balance among income groups and sectors is likely to be vital for social stability. The needed measures to enhance the quantity and quality of social services and a more effective safety net for the poor will require a number of institutional changes, including a reform of intergovernmental fiscal relations. Directed at readers working in economic policy, poverty reduction, social development, and urban and municipal finance, China's Development Priorities highlights the significance of the challenges facing China and suggests policies for achieving rapid, balanced, and sustainable growth."

Growth, inequality, and poverty; Public capital e investment; Concptual framework and model; Data, estimation, and results.