MSmitka
Posted June 20, 2011
I Also Recommend:
There are lots of edited volumes and several sole-author volumes on the Chinese economy. But despite the passage of time (year after year of 10% growth) the underlying issues and analytic approach of the authors of the book's 20 chapters remain spot on. While I keep up with the latest, this is still what I use as a text / reference work for my course on China's economy, supplemented by lots of "economics working papers" to bring things up to date. Certainly the numbers for urbanization are now different, but the Chan, Henderson and Tsui chapter is great for analytics and issues. Ditto those for structural transformation (Brandt et al), political economy (Naughton), demography (Wang et al) and fiscal issues (Wong & Bird), to name but a few. While a few chapters are written by non-China-specialists, in general the editors have pulled together the top people in each field.
The chapters are by intent accessible to general readers; tables and data are aplenty, but these are not narrow technical papers full of regression statistics. Jargon is in general expalined. Models are presented in prose form, not in mathematics; policy issues are highlighted. Each chapter includes an extensive bibliography, but these are not (mere) literature surveys, but essays in which the authors tend to take a stand rather than present on-the-one-hand-on-the-other analysis. Finally, and highly unusual for an edited volume, the chapters even cross-reference each other.
All of this means that this work has "legs" compared to much of what is available on China. To reiterate, this is a book I've felt free not only to use with undergraduate economics students, but to reuse.
KANewYork
Posted May 31, 2010
I ordered this book and 11 other books for a relative. My relative never got the books. Also B&N could not even track the books, telling me that even though I had a tracking number, the books somehow disappeared. I am very upset. B&N ordered replacements and I am waiting to see if my relative would receive them. I will not use B&N to send books anymore.
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More About This Textbook
Overview
This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China’s great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The authors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectoral development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt. The volume chronicles many shortcomings, but concludes that China's economic expansion is likely to continue during the coming decades.
Product Details
Meet the Author
Loren Brandt is Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, where he has been since 1987. Previously, he was at the Hoover Institution. Professor Brandt has published widely on China in leading economic journals, and been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in China. He is the author of Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870–1937, and was an area editor for the five-volume Oxford Dictionary of Economic History.
Thomas G. Rawski is Professor of Economics and History and UCIS Research Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His work covers many dimensions of China's development and modern economic history and includes Economic Growth and Employment in China, China's Transition to Industrialism, Economic Growth in Prewar China, Chinese History in Economic Perspective, Economics and the Historian, and China's Rise and the Balance of Influence in Asia.
Table of Contents
1. China's great economic transformation Loren Brandt and Thomas G. Rawski; 2. China and development economics Alan Heston and Terry Sicular; 3. China in light of the performance of Central and East European economies Jan Svejnar; 4. A political economy of China's economic transition Barry Naughton; 5. The demographic factor in China's transition Wang Feng and Andrew Mason; 6. The Chinese labor market in the reform era Fang Cai, Albert Park and Yaohui Zhao; 7. Education in the reform era Emily Hannum, Jere Behrman, Meiyan Wang and Jihong Liu; 8. Environmental resources and economic growth James Roumasset, Hua Wang and Kimberly Burnett; 9. Science and technology in China Albert G. Z. Hu and Gary H. Jefferson; 10. The political economy of private sector development in China Stephan Haggard and Yasheng Huang; 11. The role of law in China's economic development Donald Clarke, Peter Murrell and Susan Whiting; 12. China's fiscal system: a work in progress Christine P. W. Wong and Richard M. Bird; 13. Agriculture in China's development: past disappointments, recent successes and future challenges Jikun Huang, Keijiro Otsuka and Scott Rozelle; 14. China's financial system: past, present, and future Franklin Allen, Jun Qian and Meijun Qian; 15. China's industrial development Loren Brandt, Thomas G. Rawski and John Sutton; 16. China's embrace of globalization Lee Branstetter and Nicholas Lardy; 17. Growth and structural transformation in China Loren Brandt, Chang-tai Hsieh and Xiaodong Zhu; 18. Income inequality during China's economic transition Dwayne Benjamin, Loren Brandt, John Giles and Sangui Wang; 19. Spatial dimensions of Chinese economic development Kam Wing Chan, Vernon Henderson and Kai Yuen Tsui; 20. Forecasting China's economic growth over the next two decades Dwight H. Perkins and Thomas G. Rawski.