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
7 China's Path-Dependent Transition: Culture Mediating between Market and Socialism Carsten Herrmann-Pillath Beyond socialism and the market: economic culture as a real type China's recent transition performance raises many questions about standard assumptions of economics. Most of these are related to the disturbing fact that a socialist political system hosts one of the most dynamic economies in world history. Economists solve this puzzle by different solution strategies, mostly ones gyrating around the so-called 'gradualism' controversy.1 In this chapter, I wish to present a followup of my 1994 study (Herrmann-Pillath, 1994) in which I attempted a solution to the puzzle that focused on the costs of transition in terms of the individual and collective learning processes that become necessary to adapt individual behaviour to a new institutional framework. I posit that social learning is the core process in transition, and that this is strongly influenced by cultural factors. The analytical foundation for understanding this mechanism is path-dependence.2 In this chapter, I will show that the concept of economic culture is a much more powerful analytical device with which to understand Chinese realities because it goes back on a real-typical approach to the taxonomy of economic systems.3 Economic culture helps to explain why, in China, certain system elements of socialism and a market economy can coexist and produce a viable institutional structure over a certain period of time that extends into the future. 'Market and socialism' is not a 'third way' in a sense of denoting a special kind of economic system independent from time and space (that is, ideal typical 'market socialism') but, rather, is a combination of particular properties of institutions that is contingent in space and time and viable during a certain period. In this sense, China is in a state of never-ending transition,