OECD does some of the best data work on China & industrial policy.
Here they look at 14 manufacturing industries and 482 top firms—⅔ global output, ½ in OECD and ⅓ in China.
In nearly all industries, Chinese firms invest more, are more productive, but earn less profit.
They've developed a very cool database—the OECD MAnufacturing Groups and Industrial Corporations (MAGIC) database—that they draw on to do this, and have written several other reports comparing industrial policies and subsidies across countries.
In other recent work they look at semiconductor subsidies across the globe.
Firms in China receive far higher subsidies as a percent of revenue ~10%.
They also derive much more of their revenue domestically (~50%) and hold far more of their assets domestically (~90%).
China has systematically gained market share across these 14 sectors.
Below market borrowing is the largest subsidy differentiator in their subsidy database.
🚨 New essay: on Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun.
This isn’t a book about Xi Jinping. It’s a study of the Chinese Communist Party, centered around the life of a man who rose, fell, and rose again inside its Leninist machinery.
And it's a book about suffering and meaning 🧵
Xi Zhongxun knew suffering. He buried siblings lost to famine. At 14, he tried to kill his teacher. Soon after, he lost both parents. His first wife was only available because her husband was beheaded by a warlord. cogitations.co/p/the-life-and…
Suffering drew people toward causes bigger than themselves, that could bring order to a chaotic present.
And toward things that, Viktor Frankl would have understood, transformed the very meaning of suffering.
Today's Leviathan by Proxy is a uniquely American, superficially antistatist form of big government: of the people-placating incumbents, by the outsourcing bureaucrats, for the entrenched interest groups.
Congress, not the bureaucracy itself, is at the root of the problem:
And it is of course Congress that is the architect of the bureaucracy, which it then oversees with its beehive like panoply of committees of jurisdiction and supervision
The Soviet reform experience is a repository of ostensible lessons. But are we learning the right ones?
My new essay assesses one debate: the role of "entrenched interests" in the failure of Soviet economic reform and the USSR's ultimate demise.
At the center of the analysis are assessments of the General Secretary’s power as well as the nature of “entrenched bureaucratic interests” within a Leninist system. The essay suggests some potential lessons—and pitfalls—relevant to China analysis today. cogitations.co/p/from-reform-…
Most agree that the Soviet demise was rooted in deep problems with its economic system. An increasingly evident inability to make good on perhaps its central aspiration—cultivating an economic system superior to its Western neighbors—inspired a treadmill of reform efforts.
The Soviet partocracy led one of the most miserable and fearful existences of any ruling class in history, and this fact helps explain its rapid demise in 1991.
This is from Peter Rutland's (1994) critical review of Peter boettke's "Why Perestroika Failed"
The books thesis: "Mature Soviet-style socialism...is best understood as a rent-seeking society with the main goal of yielding perquisites to those in positions of power"
Key part of review is Rutland's disagreement with this point. "It would be more appropriate to build a model of socialist bureaucrats as risk-averse rather than rent-seeking...This is the life of the Soviet elite as I observed it."
The Soviet centrally planned economic system proved that it could work, that it could adequately (though not efficiently) mobilize and allocate resources, and that its rate of extensive growth could be quite high. But implementing and diffusing technology was among its most decisive achilles heels. Joseph Berliner's 1976 book exhaustively investigated the USSR's economic structure (price system, firm and gov organization, incentives and decision rules) to explain from the perspective of an enterprise-level manager the factors promoting and inhibiting innovation.
The last chapter is a particularly good summary of his findings and can be read for free archive.org/details/innova…
The core issue was not lack of resources, but an interlocking system of prices, organization, and incentives that tilted a manager's risk-reward for innovation implementation decidedly toward stasis. A problem inherent from the get go.
"Technology was a central element in the building of the new society. “The Soviets plus Electrification equals Communism” was Lenin’s often quoted formula. Nevertheless the active promotion of technological advance was not considered a central objective in the design of the new economic system. The main task was to replace the anarchy of the capitalist marketplace by an orderly process for allocating the nation’s resources. If that were sensibly done, technological progress would flourish more or less automatically. Freed from the chains of private property and appropriately provided with resources for invention and innovation, the new socialist men and women will manifest the full po¬ tential of human creativity."
Interesting but very pedantic chapter on the evolution of administrative divisions in China.
Faults scholars for static approaches to the study of administrative hierarchy because that is "in contradiction to the party-state power to define and change space and time in China."
Beginning in the early 1980s the Party-state transformed prefectures from a dispatched office of a province to a level in the administrative hierarchy in its own right.
The number of cities—prefecture and county—multiplied. From under 200 in the 1970s, to over 650 by the 1990s.
Decisions to merge prefecture-level government with that areas leading city (1983), establishing joint rural-urban governance, and to have cities lead counties (市领导县) in large part paved the way for China's urbanization, eg reclassify rural land to leasable urban land.