How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

Written by Yuen Yuen Ang

Narrated by Catherine Ho

How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth."

Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.

Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"-harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms.

Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765071045

Reviews for How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

[Mijia Eggers · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book tries to explain how China has achieved today’s status by applying its complex adaptive systems. However, in many places the author only criticizes the disadvantages of China’s systems and expose many failure cases. In the end, the detail of the approaches to escape the poverty is not discussed as expected.