Ling S. ChenJohns Hopkins University | JHU · School of Advanced International Studies
Ling S. Chen
Doctor of Philosophy
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18
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Publications (18)
Conventional wisdom holds that conflict is highly likely during a power transition between declining and rising powers. The spread of global supply chains has provided new economic weapons for great powers waging these conflicts, but the businesses that constitute global supply chains can make it harder or easier for them to do so. A structural the...
Why are perennially entrenched institutions so hard to reform? This article proposes a theory of institutional rebound based on China's reforms to break the three "iron-institutions" in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). I argue that reforms triggered the rise of informal institutions, which impeded further reforms and made old rules rebound. When SOE...
There is no doubt that the political economy of contemporary China has received significant attention, both in academic disciplines and in the real world. The role of the state in the economy and the relations between government and business actors have always been central concerns of classic social science works about China. There are, however, se...
Do more mobile firms pay lower taxes? Conventional wisdom argues that capital mobility creates downward pressure on corporate taxes, as firms can threaten to exit. Nevertheless, empirical findings are highly mixed and hard to reconcile, partly due to a lack of data at the microlevel. Using two comprehensive panel data sets with more than 780,000 Ch...
A rich literature has noted political business cycles in democracies. We argue that in an autocracy with strong bureaucratic institutions, the pressure of evaluation and promotion has also generated political cycles of tax-break policies. Furthermore, the timing and content of the evaluation have driven leaders to use tax breaks strategically to bu...
China’s decades of economic development involve both state and business actors. The general assumption in policy circles is that the state and state-owned enterprises are the two major drivers of economic development. However, in an economy as large as China’s, the relations among a series of actors are key: central governments, local governments,...
This chapter examines the rise of the FDI-attraction paradigm at the national level and the emergence of local investment-seeking states in the 1990s. It explores in detail the varied strategies that city governments employed to attract foreign investors to launch the campaign of FDI attraction, ranging from tax cuts and land and utility discounts...
The era of globalization saw China emerge as the world's manufacturing titan. However, the "made in China" model--with its reliance on cheap labor and thin profits--has begun to wane. Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese state shifted from attracting foreign investment to promoting the technological competitiveness of domestic firms. This transition...
How does a globalized context influence domestic development policies and the allocation of government resources in an authoritarian country like China? This study explores the coalitional politics in China’s transition from foreign direct investment (FDI) attraction to domestic technology upgrading, which created winners and losers in the local al...
Over the past two decades, China has launched a nationwide endeavor to push domestic firms up the value chain. This article explores why, in some localities, Chinese firms had significant success in upgrading, while in other localities, firms were paradoxically trapped in a race-to-the-bottom competition. Drawing on national economic census data, a...
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This article reviews the contributions of three important books that analyze, respectively, the sources and patterns of institutional inertial, adjustment, and change of Japanese economy in response to the country's prolonged economic stagnation. Drawing on their scholarship, the article highlights the dual character of Japanese capitalism – the pe...
David Kang, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002)Vivek Chibber, Locked In Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton University Press, 2003)Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private...