Why are we rich and others poor? What is preventing the less-developed countries from catching up with the more developed? How did we become rich? Underlying these questions are more fundamental ones: What is the nature of economic progress? What are its causes? I seek the answers to these...

We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

Over the last 3 decades, the product, labor, and capital markets of the People’s Republic of China have become gradually more integrated within its borders, though integration has been significantly slower for capital markets. There remains a significant urban-rural divide, and cities in the...

The question of whether China has reached the Lewis turning point (LTP) has recently been intensively debated in the literature. Partly, this is due to the profound policy implication of the turning point posited by Lewis (1954) and Ranis and Fei (1961), while it is also closely related to the...

This chapter provides a review of China’s economic growth since 1978. Studying China’s economic success may shed new light on the political economy of growth, the impacts of the ascent of large countries on the rest of the world, and the relationship between inequality and economic growth....

We examine whether China's remarkable reduction in income poverty has been accompanied by comparable progress in health. Our findings are fourfold: (a) province-level rates of improvement in life expectancy were higher in the 1990s than in the 1970s and the 1980s, and were lowest in the 1980s....

We investigate the impact of manufacturing employment growth on the non-tradable sector for prefecture-level cities in China. Using the 2000 and 2010 Censuses of Population, we apply the shift-share approach to isolate the exogenous change of employment growth in manufacturing. We find that...

We consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance by appealing to regional variation within one single country (China) over the 1997–2009 period. We find evidence in support of Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007), in that regions specializing in more sophisticated goods...