China's Engagement With African Countries: Key Findings and Recommendations

Summarizes findings on China's engagement with Africa and implications for the latter's social and economic conditions. Makes recommendations for African policy makers to ensure the engagement is mutually beneficial, broadly distributed, and monitored

Preserving Indigenous Paradigms in an Age of Globalization: Pragmatic Strategies for the Development of Clinical Legal Aid in China

This Essay uses the experiences of international efforts to promote clinical legal aid in China to explore one such unexpected consequence of globalization: international assistance\u27s understandable focus on more familiar kinds of legal aid institutions and activities can unintentionally impede the development of indigenous legal aid practices and institutions that might ultimately be better suited for the particular domestic environment. Part I of this essay will discuss international efforts to promote clinical legal aid in China, Part II will discuss reductive strategies for promoting legal development and the problems they present, Part III will discuss pragmatic strategies for promoting legal development and Part IV will provide an example from China to demonstrate the superior catalyzing potential inherent in pragmatic developmental strategies. The essay concludes that international development projects need to shift their focus from one of simply replicating successful foreign models (what we will call a reductive strategy) to one of promoting discovery of the indigenous developmental implications and possibilities inherent in the domestic environment (what we will call a pragmatic strategy)

Reflections on Chinese Political Economy

he aim of this paper is to discuss the reasons for the rapid growth in the Chinese economy over the last three decades. China has been growing fastest in human history, which has an impact on the global economy and also various challenges that the country faces. It is seen as heralding a major shift in the international division of labour through changes in its output and employment pattern. China is described as becoming the “work-shop” of the world as a result of the expansion of its manufacturing production. Its impact on other Asian economies and also on the world economy has the potential to be enormous. Market reforms and opening up of the Chinese economy to trade and foreign capital since the early 1980s, have unleashed entrepreneurial energies. China’s development policies can be best understood if these are looked at from an institutional economic perspective. This article is based on a review of published papers in the field of economic policies, focusing on the debate concerning the respective roles of the state and the market. A wide range of data sources are presented, including statistics compiled and generated by wide range of organisations such as IMF, World Bank and WTO that are non-governmental agencies. Secondary data of this type provides greater potential for addressing the research questions than statistics produced by the national government. This study finds that corporate debt has risen in recent years in China, a large part of these loans having been financed with investment in trust products issued by the banks. In addition, a huge amount of credit has been channelled into the real estate sector, and seems to be heading towards the housing and estate sectors, meaning that most of this is speculative. Investments are financed by credit; which clearly needs to be repaid. If these levels of debt become unsustainable this could pose a major challenge for the Chinese economy

China, the European Union and the United States of America: Partners or competitors?

This working paper brings together assessments of the trilateral relations between China, the EU und the US from the disciplines of political science and economics. The first paper primarily addresses the following three issues: a) China's current development and prospects b) EU-China relations, and c) recommendations in terms of EU policies towards China. The second paper applies a three tier analysis looking first at changes in the Chinese and global economic setting caused by China's WTO accession. It then takes a look at the bilateral economic relations between China and the EU and US respectively. Finally the scored goals and competing interests of the USA and the EU vis-à-vis China are analysed. --EU-US-China relations,China's domestic development,EU policies,China's external economic relations,China's WTO accession,structural change,World economy

China and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), established in 1988, is part of the World Bank Group. Its mandate is to promote foreign investment in its member countries by providing political risk insurance and technical assistance to promote investment. In developing this case study of China's evolving relationship with MIGA, the author asked: Why did China decide to seek membership in MIGA? What was the outcome of the relationship between China and MIGA? How has that relationship affected economic and legal reform in China and the country's integration with the multilateral investment insurance system? How can MIGA strengthen its role? And how can MIGA prevent potential claims to its portfolio in China? MIGA's comparative advantages are its international experience in underwriting and operating its portfolio, its neutral position and approach, its mediation and legal advice, and the fact that its guarantee portfolio is unaffected by bilateral relations. The author suggested that in China, MIGA should screen foreign direct investment (FDI), not just encourage it, because some FDI in China has been of poor quality, with little transfer of skills and technology. Some local partners have conceded too many discounts to foreign investors, without considering the cost of key assets such as land and machinery. Some foreign investors have taken advantage of local officials'eagerness for foreign capital, pressuring them to grant guarantees they should not grant and to allow unacceptable levels of environmental pollution in industry. China receives one-third of all FDI in developing countries. To continue attracting such investment, it must design a rule-based legal system governing FDI, making its rules and regulations more transparent, uniform, and consistent with international practice. As a neutral third party, MIGA could make policy recommendations that authorities might consider and accept -- such as policies designed to encourage less investment in labor-intensive firms and more in high-tech industries.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Legal Products,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Legal Products,National Governance,Foreign Direct Investment,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

Framing China: Transformation and Institutional Change

The paper offers a frame for investigating the extent to which decentralisation, and subsequent locally chosen institutions shape private organisational and institutional innovation. To include the numerous locally based “economic regimes†matters as the resulting business system reflects political institution setting and private organisational innovation. Such a frame is a necessary first step for empirical studies attempting to explain the heterogeneity of China’s business systems, the emergence of hybrid organisations, and last but none the least, the different growth rates that can be observed across China.Transition Economy;Institutional Change in China;Private Business Sector

Incentive Contracting versus Ownership Reforms: Evidence from China's Township and Village Enterprises

We use a unique data set to study the implications of introducing managerial incentives and, in addition to incentives, better defined ownership for a firm's financial performance. The data set traces the ten-year history of 80 Chinese rural enterprises, known as township and village enterprises. During this period, these originally (mostly) community owned, local government controlled socialist collective firms were first allowed to introduce managerial incentive contracts and then to change to ownership forms of more clearly defined income and control rights. The study finds that introducing managerial incentives had a positive but statistically insignificant effect on these firms' performance measured by accounting return on assets or return on equity. It also finds that the performance is significantly better under ownership forms of better-defined rights than under community ownership even when the latter is supplemented with managerial incentive contracts. The findings shed lights on some important theoretical and policy issues.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39749/3/wp365.pd

Oceanus.

v. 26, no. 4 (1983

Thirty Years of Agricultural Transition in China (1977-2007) and the "New Rural Campaign"

Agriculture in China has experienced a compelling growth in the early 1980s, a buoyant upbeat in the early 1990s, and an extended period of low growth after 1995. Decollectivization, mar-ket reforms, public investments and technology have played a critical role during this overall successful process. However, the transition has also led to increasing inequalities between the agricultural and non-agricultural population, and substantial institutional issues remain to be fully addressed. The Chinese government is now reemphasizing agriculture and rural develop-ment under its New Rural Campaign with the objective to address rural-urban inequalities, but a stronger emphasis on participation and tenure reforms is warranted.agriculture, rural development, transition, institutions, China, Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development, O43, P21, P32,

China, the ‘East Asian Model’ and Late Development

There is an influential, neo-liberal proposition in the scholarly literature on China’s economic transformation since the late 1970s. It states that China’s reformed economic institutions are a mix of market-conforming and market-supplanting elements, that its developmental achievements so far have been ascribable to the conforming elements whereas the accumulated problems being ascribable to the supplanting elements, and that the problems have tended to outweigh the achievements as the country’s economic transition progresses from the allegedly easy phase to the difficult phase. This paper offers an alternative interpretation of the Chinese experience. The central proposition is that China’s economic institutions could be seen in favourable light both theoretically and with reference to the East Asian development experience. Specifically, the developmental implications of the market-conforming and market-supplanting elements should not be understood in any absolute sense, but rather depend on the appropriate match or otherwise between the institutions and the external environment. The developmental achievements to date indicate that China’s economic reform has managed to achieve a basically appropriate match between the two aspects, although enormous uncertainties still cloud over the future prospects owing to changes both in the external environment and the reform strategies of the state leadership