How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) - Hardcover

"How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime." * Building State Capability Blog * "Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state... has actually practiced (not merely preached) innovation, problem solving, and effective implementation.... Future studies of bureaucratic life in China and elsewhere must reckon seriously with Ang's account." * Governance * "While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation.... This analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level." * The World Bank * "This book is a triumph, opening a window onto the political economy of China's astonishing rise that takes as its starting point systems and complexity. Its lessons apply far beyond China's borders." * Oxfam Blog * "As if explaining modern Chinese economic development was not enough of a challenge, Ang has two even loftier goals. The first is methodological. She expresses a frustration with political science's causality obsession and modeling approaches that deliver isolated snapshots of complex processes.... Ang's second ambition is to apply this coevolutionary schema to how we understand economic development generally." * Perspectives on Politics * "China's transformation cannot be attributed to a single cause; rather, it arose from a contingent, interactive process-Ang calls it 'directed improvisation.' She formalizes this insight which has the potential to influence future studies of institutional and economic change beyond China." * Foreign Affairs * "This book is an invaluable addition to the scholarship on the political economy of development." * Pacific Affairs * "The book combines methodological rigour, employing a complexity perspective hitherto unknown in standard political economy analyses... with rich original empirical data drawn from more than 400 interviews.... This is an important book with a bold thesis that, at its most ambitious, demands a rethinking of the history and evolution of capitalism.... In terms of policy implications, Ang's thesis has the potential to upend much that the global development establishment holds dear." * The Straits Times *

Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly. Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt.

 

By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions—features that defy norms of good governance—to build markets. Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur. Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation. 

 

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today. Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases. Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps.