[Biweekly Symposium] No.367, Economics of Transition and Chinas reform
Author:Unirule
Time：2008-08-01 14:13:05 Clicks:
Topic: Economics of Transition and China's reform Lecturer:Prof. Fan Gang Discussants:Prof. Mao Yushi, Prof. Cao Yuan Zheng, Prof. Sheng Hong, Prof. Li Shi, Prof. Zhao Renwei
This year is the thirty anniversaries of China’s reform and “opening-up”. Unirule, which has been working on enhancing the public understanding of the merit of an free economy since it was founded in 1993, hold a series of symposium on re-examining the gains from China’s 30 years of reform and “opening-up” in this June to September. Below it’s the proceedings of the third of this series of symposiums. At the 367th Unirule bi-weekly symposium, Prof. Fan Gang, director of National Economic Research Institute, delivered a speech entitled “Economics of Transition and China’s reform”. Prof. Fan Gang’s has been doing research on Economics of Transition in the past decade. This talk is based on his research on China’s transition process. The obstacles encountered during the process of any reform can be summarized into two categories: conflict of interest and lack reform know how. China’s reform provided a universal answer to both of these questions. China’s research measures, like the adoption of household contract responsibility system, hardly affected any interest group. On the contrary, almost every people benefit from it. Reform like this can be seen as pareto improvement. However, as the reform deepening, further reform can not take place without hurt the interest of certain groups. Unlike other former central planed economies, like Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, China didn’t adopt measures like “shock therapy” which was the leading theory of that time. China used the more practical “trial and error” approach. Reform measures were first implement in small scale. The scale up of reform policies took place only after enough experience has been accumulated in plot sites. According to Prof. Fan, these “trial and error” approaches are the best way to deal with uncertainty and the lack of know how.
