China's Great Economic Transformation

Loren Brandt · Thomas G. Rawski

Apr 2008 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

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 editors 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 sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

About 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.