Rural China Takes Off: The Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform

In the 1990s, Dr. Oi wrote several journal articles detailing the crucial role of the local state in post-Mao China's economic development. This book is a long version based on her extensive field research. China's explosive growth of rural industry raises considerable doubt about conventional wisdoms on property rights. Because these factories were collectively owned, they should have had all kinds of incentive problems. Yet, they were the engine of China's unusually rapid rural development from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s. Dr. Oi explains how they accomplished this. In the late 1990s, the overinvested TVE sector stalled and contracted, with many firms subsequently privatized to managers, which Dr. Oi discusses briefly in this work and expands on in the volume she co-edited _Property Rights and Economic Reform_. The causes and methods of privatization of TVEs is complex and has resulted in much academic literature, of which Susan Whiting's _Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change_ was an early example. People in development agencies should take notice of Oi's book, because the history of local state corporatism and community ownership of firms in the first 20 years of the reform era has important lessons for both growth and distribution.