Offers Fresh Insight into Crucial Debates over the Causes of Diverging and Converging Political Trajectories in the Region  

This coauthored monograph examines how business groups have interacted with state authorities in the three central Andean countries from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first. This time span covers three distinct economic regimes: the period of state-led import substitutive industrialization from the 1950s through the 1970s, the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s, and the post-neoliberal period since the earlier 2000s. These three countries share many similarities but also have important differences that reveal how power is manifested. Peru has had an almost unbroken hegemony of business elites who leverage their power over areas of state activity that affect them. Bolivia, by contrast, shows how strong social movements have challenged business dominance at crucial periods, reflecting a weaker elite class that is less able to exercise influence over decision-making. Ecuador falls in between these two, with business elites being more fragmented than in Peru and social movements being weaker than in Bolivia. The authors analyze the viability of these different regimes and economic models, why they change in specific circumstances, and how they affect the state and its citizen

This report assesses Chinese investment in U.S. aviation from 2005 to 2016. It provides context in China’s demand for aviation products and aviation industrial policies, while assessing technology transfers and impact on U.S. competitiveness. Chinese investment in U.S. aviation over the past decade has primarily involved lower-technology general aviation manufacturers that do not affect U.S. competitiveness.

In many countries, public sector institutions impose heavy burdens on economic life: heavy and arbitrary taxes retard investment, regulations enrich corrupt bureaucrats, state firms consume national wealth, and the most talented people turn to rent-seeking rather than productive activities. As a consequence of such predatory policies--described in this book as the grabbing hand of the state--entrepreneurship lingers and economies stagnate.

The authors of this collection of essays describe many of these pathologies of a grabbing hand government, and examine their consequences for growth. The essays share a common viewpoint that political control of economic life is central to the many government failures that we observe. Fortunately, a correct diagnosis suggests the cures, including the best strategies of fighting corruption, privatization of state firms, and institutional building in the former socialist economies. Depoliticization of economic life emerges as the crucial theme of the appropriate reforms. The book describes the experiences with the grabbing hand government and its reform in medieval Europe, developing countries, transition economies, as well as today's United States.

When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Morris Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise—bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare—developed in China during the war years 1937–1945.

Bian offers a new theory of institutional change that explains the formation of China’s state enterprise system as the outcome of the sustained systemic crisis triggered by the Sino–Japanese war. This groundbreaking work combines critical analysis of government policies with case studies of little-studied enterprises in heavy industries and the ordnance industry. Drawing on extensive research in previously unavailable archives, Bian adds a valuable historical perspective to the current debate on how to reform China’s sluggish and unprofitable state-owned firms.