Woman carrying rice plants in China. Nico Heerink (IFPRI)
MOTIVATION
While China’s dramatic economic growth in recent years has made it the subject of many case studies, it was not until 2004 that an “insider” undertook an in depth evaluation of the country’s policy reform process. Working with leading experts on the reform era who are well informed about the internal processes and logic that drove the reform movement, IFPRI explored China’s economic growth. Researchers hoped that this information could be helpful to other developing countries (for example, Ethiopia and Tanzania) that had yet to undertake a broad set of reforms to launch more rapid economic growth.
OUTCOMES
In an article first published in the Review of Development Economics, IFPRI researchers and partners analyzed regional inequality in China from the Communist revolution to the present. During the three peak periods identified—coinciding with the famine of the late 1950s, the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the period of openness and global integration in the late 1990s—regional inequality can be explained by three key policy variables: (1) the ratio of heavy industry to gross output value, (2) the degree of decentralization, and (3) the degree of openness. The article has been cited more than 500 times since its original publication in 2004. Additionally, two related books authored by IFPRI researchers—Narratives of Chinese Economic Reforms: How Does China Cross the River? (2010) and The Oxford Companion to the Economics of China (2014)—examined China’s reform process.
