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Begin New Search Topic Government Author Andrew G. Walder

1. Sociological Dimensions of China's Economic Transition: Organization, Stratification, and Social Mobility

Author:
Andrew G. Walder
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Despite skepticism about official economic statistics, there is little doubt that China since 1978 has undergone an economic transformation of historic proportions. This outcome stands in stark opposition to arguments that were once widely accepted in several scholarly communities, and which are still highly influential even today. In the early 1980s there was wide agreement that “partial” reform, under a single party dictatorship that sought indefinitely to preserve public ownership, was a recipe for failure. China specialists, students of comparative economic systems, and economists who advised governments and international agencies about postcommunist restructuring in Eurasia were initially in broad agreement on this point.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
China and Asia

2. Politics and Property in Transitional Economies: A Theory of Elite Opportunity

Author:
Andrew G. Walder
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Command economies gave communist-era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and privatization inject new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders to extract incomes or assume ownership. These opportunities vary with the extensiveness of regime change and the barriers to asset appropriation. Within these limits, they further vary with the concentration and form of economic assets and structural changes induced by reform. Elite advantages are smallest where regime change is extensive and barriers to asset appropriation are high, and in small-scale economies that grow rapidly. In China, there has been no regime change and privatization has been delayed and slow. In the rural economy, elites keep their posts as a source of economic advantage, while low entry barriers to household enterprise and rapid growth have created new entrepreneurial elites. After two decades, rural officials nonetheless enjoy large net income advantages that grow along with the expansion of labor markets and private entrepreneurship. These are not generic outcomes of market reform, but the product of market reform in distinctive political and structural conditions.
Topic:
Communism, Economics, Government, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
China and Asia