China's economic performance of the past two decades presents a puzzle for the economics of transition and development: Enormous private business incentives were unleashed that have fueled rapid economic growth despite the fact that China has had very weak "conventional institutions" (such as...

During transition, maintaining employment and providing a social safety net to the unemployed are important to social stability, which in turn is crucial for the productivity of the whole economy. Because independent institutions for social safety are lacking and firms with strong profit...

We construct an agency model in which the planner (agent) makes project starting and termination decisions on behalf of the state (principal) to reflect the practice of socialist economies. The model shows that asymmetric information between the state and the planner regarding the quality of...

Local governments (LGs) are seen as producers of the local public good ('the good'). An authoritarian country is one in which the government decides if the good should be produced and how much to tax to finance it, as versus a democracy in which voters decide. This paper identifies conditions...

There are two schools of thoughts on the important issue of reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We call them the ownership school and the management school. The ownership school argues that the key to the reform is to diversify SOEs' ownership, including privatization, in order to...

Countries making the transition to a market economy often experience an increase in corruption along with an increase in growth. This observation is puzzling in the context of current models, which emphasize the destructive nature of corruption. We present a model of corruption and reform which...

Local officials in China have strongly supported new non-state firms, yet other officials in transition countries have often strongly hindered them. We argue that a likely cause of these sharp differences in behavior is differences in the source of government revenue. Local revenue in China came...

It has been increasingly recognized that the Chinese goverm-nent's newly acquired enthusiasm for economic development is a major factor explaining the relative success of China's transition from socialism. This paper argues that the changed behavior of the Chinese government is an outcome of a...

In the journey of post-socialist transition, many enterprises have accumulated large amount of debts and in deep financial distress. There axe many existing options that can be used to China's state owned enterprises (SOE's) axe facing a debt crisis. Over 80% of state enterprises have debt/asset...

Countries making the transition to a market economy often experience an increase in corruption along with an increase in growth. This observation is puzzling in the context of current models, which emphasize the destructive nature of corruption. We present a model of corruption and reform which...