We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

Starting from almost null in the late 1990s, China's mobile phone handset industry has grown to account for more than 40 percent of the current world production. While export growth has been overwhelmingly led by multi-national corporations (MNCs), increasingly fierce competition in the domestic...

China’s huge domestic market is constantly expanding, and is low-end demand oriented and highly dispersed. The domestic market-based development of China’s industrial cluster, however, is not only a quantitative expansion, but has also been accompanied with remarkable qualitative...

China and India are the two major gainers from the removal of quotas on textiles and clothing with phasing out of Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) with effect from Jan. 1, 2005. However, to reap the maximum benefits of the new quota free regime and to sustain the growth in this sector it is...

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

Alwyn Young (2000) provided evidence for distortions begetting distortions in a partially reformed economy by examining barriers to inter-provincial trade in China. His findings of increasing barriers to inter-provincial trade are based on five arguments. This paper critically examines each of...

China’s housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (i) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (ii) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that...

This paper provides a theory to explain the paradoxical features of the great housing boom in China — the persistently faster-than-GDP housing price growth, exceptionally high capital returns, and excessive vacancy rates. The expectation that high capital returns driven mainly by resource...