Inflation and Investment Controls in China : The Political Economy of Central-Local Relations during the Reform Era

Rating:
Summary: Breaking new ground
Review: China specialists, and political scientists of any stripe studying "state capacity" would do well to check this book out.

Businesspeople or others negotiating with local governments may also want to have a look at the chapters describing the ways that the central government can curtail local autonomy.

Many observers of China have interpreted the decentralization of economic authority to local governments as representing a loss of power for the central government. In this book, Huang carefully lays out the objectives of politicians at the central and provincial levels, and the control systems available to the center. He then uses economic data on inflation and investment to demonstrate that, at least for this one aspect, the central government has in fact been able to use its political tools to rein in provincial leaders when necessary.

This book is exemplary for its careful generation of hypotheses, and testing of these using publicly available, reasonably objective data.

Rating:
Summary: Breaking new ground
Review: China specialists, and political scientists of any stripe studying "state capacity" would do well to check this book out.

Businesspeople or others negotiating with local governments may also want to have a look at the chapters describing the ways that the central government can curtail local autonomy.

Many observers of China have interpreted the decentralization of economic authority to local governments as representing a loss of power for the central government. In this book, Huang carefully lays out the objectives of politicians at the central and provincial levels, and the control systems available to the center. He then uses economic data on inflation and investment to demonstrate that, at least for this one aspect, the central government has in fact been able to use its political tools to rein in provincial leaders when necessary.

This book is exemplary for its careful generation of hypotheses, and testing of these using publicly available, reasonably objective data.