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How China Escaped the Poverty Trap . By Ang Yuen Yuen . Ithaca : Cornell University Press , 2016. Pp. xvi, 326. $27.95, hardcover.
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East Asia, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia
Economic historians have long labored to explain the mechanisms behind economic growth. Social scientists engaged in explaining political economies of development have typically assigned far more prominent roles to policy making. More unusual are political economy studies that formulate an argument about a recent economic development experience and argue that the principles explaining it are the same as those found in prominent approaches to economic history, thereby proposing an interpretation of economic history scholarship in light of more contemporary developments. Yuen Yuen Ang achieves precisely this with her new interpretation of China's economic development path. Her key conceptual innovation is to bring complexity theory into the study of economic growth. Rejecting causal models typified by regression equations, she says economic development emerges from a co-evolution of development strategies and markets.
The core of this book's new research materials are some 400 interviews made between 2006 and 2015 with officials who were responsible for shaping the development efforts in three Chinese locales. Ang combines these rich sources with a clear interpretation of policy formulation at the center and the types of goals set in order to influence as often as control local official behavior, an approach that enables multiple responses to similar challenges by those most knowledgeable about local situations and thus best placed to make effective decisions. In brief her argument is "Poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first building markets with weak institutions...