How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap is a groundbreaking book that challenges traditional political economics and offers a new paradigm for development.

Written by Yuen Yuen Ang, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of how China was able to escape the poverty trap and achieve rapid growth.

The author rejects the three traditional answers offered by political economists - stimulate growth first, build good institutions first, or rely on luck - and instead embraces a complex adaptive systems approach that recognizes the interdependence of societies and the human capacity for innovation. The book reveals two key lessons on development: transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems, and the first step out of poverty is to "use what you have" - harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if it means defying first-world norms. With bold and meticulous research, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how societies can escape poverty traps and achieve sustainable growth.