How China flouts conventional wisdom on institutions and growth
Conventional wisdom says that the quality of governance determines economic prospects. But China scores poorly on most commonly used measures of good government, and achieves high economic growth. How can this be? In the current issue ofGovernance, Bo Rothstein agrees that “the institutional theory of development is probably right,” but that current scholarship has “missed the importance of a specific organizational form of public administration,” the cadre organization. The cadre model is sometimes more efficient than Weberian bureaucracy, Rothstein argues. It “works as a solution to the most general problem in public administration: how to handle delegated discretion.” Read the article.
