Mapping coevolution -- Directed improvisation -- Balancing variety and uniformity -- Franchising the bureaucracy -- From building to preserving markets -- Connecting first-movers and laggards -- Conclusion : how development actually happened beyond China

How do modern fiscal states arise? Perhaps the most dominant explanation, based on the European experience, is that democratic institutions that limited the extractive power of states-exemplified by the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England-paved the way for the rise of fiscal capacity and...

The recent economic slowdown in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has triggered fear and even panic among global investors. In particular, observers are worried that manufacturing - the engine of the PRC's hypergrowth over the past decades - has hit the doldrums. This article shows that...

The recent economic slowdown in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has triggered fear and even panic among global investors. In particular, observers are worried that manufacturing - the engine of the PRC's hypergrowth over the past decades - has hit the doldrums. This article shows that...

How do modern fiscal states arise? Perhaps the most dominant explanation, based on the European experience, is that democratic institutions that limited the extractive power of states-exemplified by the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England-paved the way for the rise of fiscal capacity and...

The Chinese central government, spearheaded by the Ministry of Finance, launched a bold reform of the treasury management system in 2001, centralizing the disbursement of budgetary funds. This article analyzes the rationale of institutional reform from the perspective of the central reformers....

Authoritarian states restrain online activism not only through repression and censorship, but also by indirectly weakening the ability of netizens to self-govern and constructively engage the state. I demonstrate this argument by comparing I-Paid-A-Bribe (IPAB) — a crowd-sourcing platform that...

The study of public administration in developing countries needs to look beyond the Weberian model as the only ideal-type of bureaucracy. When we assume that there exists only one gold standard of public administration, all other organizational forms that do not conform to the Weberian ideal are...

What explains the persistent growth of public employment in reform-era China despite repeated and forceful downsizing campaigns? Within China, why do some provinces have more public employees and experience higher rates of bureaucratic expansion than others? Among electoral regimes, the creation...