Kornai János - Qian, Yingyi: Market and Socialism. In the Light of the Experiences of China and Vietnam - IEA Conference 146. (New York, 2009) / angol nyelven
7 Carsten Hermann-Pillath: China's Path-Dependent Transition: Culture Mediating between Market and Socialism
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath 111 but no longer a transition economy (in a similar vein, see Kennedy, 2003). The task of this chapter is not only to improve our understanding of Chinese realities, but also to draw some theoretical conclusions from the Chinese experience. Thus, I put much emphasis on theory, to which the first part of the chapter is devoted. I sketch the analytical relation between path-dependence and culture. The second part of the chapter applies the resulting methodology to a particular aspect of Chinese transition; that is, property rights in rural China, taking land ownership and rural industry as two empirical cases. The concept of culture: path-dependence and the cognitive embeddedness of institutions Three types of path-dependence and the gradualism/'big bang' controversy Path-dependence is one of the central buzzwords in claims about the historicity of economic change (Arthur, 1994). Sometimes, both ideas are simply equated; that is, path-dependence would simply mean historicity, which is seriously misleading because historicity is a much broader concept. The term 'historicity' denotes the singularity of trajectories of change that might result from the singularity of events that are usually treated as random shocks in economic models. Yet, the concept of randomness is too weak as it presupposes a closed space of possible events and, hence, a probability distribution. The essence of historicity, in general, lies in the singularity of events in an open and evolving space of possible states of the world. Historicity and true uncertainty are two sides of the same coin (North, 2005). In the context of general economic models, this includes all sets of exogenous determinants that are unique to the case in point. Further, on the phenomenological level singularity can be a property of events on a very different scale, such as structural properties of economic systems on the one hand and 'small' triggering events such as the role of single change agents on the other. However, this kind of historicity does not imply that past states of the system determine its direction of change in the present. It only results in the need to link up general hypotheses about systems dynamics with a descriptive account of the time sequence of singular events. This, indeed, gives rise to a singular character for the entire process but does not yet imply that the system is non-ergodic. Path-dependence is a much more specific form of singularity, which relates to the non-ergodic nature of the systems processes.