Critical Historical Junctures, Resource Endowment and Evolutionary Path in Transition:

An Analytical Framework of China’s Development Model in Comparative Perspectives

主讲人：陶然，中国人民大学经济学院教授、中国人民大学汉青学院副院长

时间：10月16日（周二）下午2点至4点

地点：京师大厦9406

【主要内容】The meteoric rise of the Chinese economy in the past four decades has attracted enormous attention from and raises profound questions for social science researchers. However, the literature has so far failed to offer an analytical framework to explain the major stylized facts of China’s growth in transition. Building on the literature on new institutional economics, critical historical juncture and resource curse, I propose an integrated framework to reinterpret the Chinese development models in different periods since the foundation of the People’s Republic. I argue that the initial small institutional differences between China and the Former Soviet Union, interacted with the 1972 critical juncture, facilitated China’s gradualist and relatively smooth market-oriented reform and at the same time ruined the chance for the adoption of a gradualist approach in Russia’s market transition. I will explain why after mid-1990s China started an investment-driven and export -oriented growth model that bears the birthmarks of a typical East Asian developmental state, the country’s performance in income disparity, environmental protection, social stability and land development has been very different. Even though the differences in initial conditions such as labor and natural resource endowment between China and other East Asian developmental state are relatively small, the political and economic structure of China shaped by the second critical juncture of the late 1980s has made China’s comprehensive economic reform toward a full-fledged market economy stalled in the middle and thus China’s developmental state model began to diverge from the typical East Asian model since mid-1990s.  I conclude by proposing to reset the research agenda in social sciences on plan economy, economic transition as well as developmental state under a new theoretical framework that takes into account the roles of critical junctures interacting small initial differences in shaping the institutional divergence and the different performance outcomes across countries.   

【主讲人介绍】陶然，中国人民大学经济学院教授、中国人民大学汉青学院副院长、中国公共经济与治理研究中心主任, 1996年获得北京大学理学硕士(城市与区域规划)学位， 2002年获得美国芝加哥大学经济学博士学位， 2009年之后在中国人民大学担任经济学教授。他的研究专注于与中国正在进行中的经济转型相关的多个领域。他近年来的研究集中在中国经济转型中高增长的政治经济学、中国城市化过程中的土地和户籍制度改革、农村发展，地方治理及公共财政等领域。他主持过或正在主持两项国家自然科学基金重点项目，正在主持国家社科基金重大项目，研究中国城镇化过程中的土地改革、户籍改革与城市发展问题。 他近年来在知名国际期刊发表了超过50篇英文论文，同时中文社科权威与核心期刊上发表论文超过50篇。目前他关于中国增长模式、中国新型城镇化、区域经济发展、中国经济与社会转型、农村基层治理和政府公共财政的研究在国、内外学术界，中央与各级地方政府产生重要影响。