In 1980 China's GDP per capita was $312.And from China watcher and raconteur Andrew Batson, October 25:
In 2017 China's GDP per capita was $8,836 with purchasing power parity being $17,015.
The world has never seen anything like it.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in economics to three academics “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” has prompted some caustic commentary about how much, or little, global poverty has actually been reduced by the highly targeted, small-scale policy interventions evaluated by such experiments....MUCH MORE
It’s well known that most of the reduction in global poverty in recent decades, however it is measured, is accounted for by rapid economic growth in big Asian economies. On the World Bank’s numbers, China alone accounts for about 60% of the decline in the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide (China’s poor population declined by 742 million people, while the world’s declined by 1.16 billion people).
The contribution of randomized controlled trials to China’s poverty reduction has been, to a first approximation, zero. Yao Yang, the dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, wrote in an English-language op-ed that “Experiments might help policymakers improve existing welfare programs or lay the foundation for new ones, but they cannot tell a poor country how to achieve sustained growth.” In a similar vein, Harvard professor Dani Rodrik tweeted: “Remarkable how little today’s development economics has to say about the most impressive poverty reduction in history ever.”
So if the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences were to award a prize for “contributions to sustained economic growth in China,” who should it go to? This is not a straightforward question. The prize is usually given to academics for contributions to theory and research, not to practitioners for implementing economic policies. As Bruno Frey noted in a 2018 article on China’s absence from the history of winners of the economics Nobel, “It may be argued that the Chinese economy has been successful without the help of high-ranking academic economists.” There are also few Chinese economists that appear in lists of the most-cited scholars–possibly because Chinese economists have historically tended to focus more on advising their own government than publishing in English-language journals.
It’s true that the decisions that led to China’s sustained economic growth were not mostly driven by research published in peer-reviewed journals. But that does not mean that economic ideas did not play a role in those decisions, or that the role of economists was not important. At least, as long as one does not hold to an excessively credential-focused definition of “economist” as meaning only a person holding an economics PhD. Pieter Bottelier’s recent book, Economic Policy Making in China (1949-2016): The Role of Economists, introduces many of these Chinese economic thinkers, few of whom are widely known abroad. One figure particularly stands out: Xue Muqiao. Bottelier writes:...
And as noted when People's Daily's online property floated their IPO, I was reminded of Deng Xiaoping's comment on communism vs capitalism:
Deng Xiaoping Smiles: Peoples Daily Online is Doing an IPO
*Mr. Deng helped lift 1,000,000,000 Chinese out of subsistence poverty with pragmatic market reforms:
"Do not care if the cat is black or white, what matters is it catches mice"
Previously from Mr. Batson:
Anton Chekhov, the investigative data journalist
Once in Harbin: The debate raging over China’s Northeast rust belt
"There are laws of history, and they work in China’s favor"
How To Write Better Harvard Business Review Articles-Step 1: Have Cormac McCarthy Do Your Editing
