For the peasants in rural China, the harvest season is the occasion when several different worlds—the business world of large companies, the entrepreneurial world of middlemen, local elites and peasant households—are compressed into the same social space, thereby inducing intensive economic and social interactions and crystallizing social relations among villagers, local elites and markets. Based on ethnographic research on the autumn harvest in a township in northern China, this study sheds light on distinctive modes of market transactions across produces, and diverse interactions between markets and local institutions involving different co-ordination mechanisms, rhythms and social relationships. A more nuanced image of market transactions emerges from these observations, calling for a more refined conceptualization of markets and further research on their implications for institutional changes.

Health systems provide a rich field for testing hypotheses of institutional economics. The incentive structure of current healthcare delivery systems have deep historical and cultural roots, yet must cope with rapid technological change as well as market and government failures. This paper applies the economic approach of comparative and historical institutional analysis (Aoki, 2001; Greif, 2006) to health care systems by conceptualizing physician control over dispensing revenues as a social institution. The theory developed—emphasizing the interplay between cultural beliefs, interest groups, technological change, insurance expansion and government financing—offers a plausible explanation of reforms since the 1960s separating prescribing from dispensing in societies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. Technological change and adoption of universal coverage trigger reforms by greatly increasing the social opportunity costs of physician over-prescribing and reshaping the political economy of forces impinging on the doctor–patient relationship.

Big changes are ahead for China, probably abrupt ones. The economy has grown so rapidly for many years, over 30 years at an average of 9 percent a year, that its size makes it a major player in trade and finance and increasingly in political and military matters. This growth is not only of great importance internationally, it is already having profound domestic social effects and it is bound to have internal political ones — sooner or later.

Two kinds of changes are in store: political and economic. The order in which they occur will affect their impacts, and that order is very uncertain. In any case, big discontinuities are likely before 2020.

Established in 2007, the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) promotes a comparative understanding of health and health policy in the Asia-Pacific region through research, collaboration with scholars throughout the region, a colloquium series on health and demographic change in the Asia-Pacific, and conferences and publications on comparative
health policy topics.

China’s economic growth over the past three decades is unprecedented. Although this growth is commonly attributed to a high domestic savings rate among “thrifty” Chinese, savings alone cannot promote economic growth unless productivity has continuously grown for such a long period. This article uses a one-sector, neoclassical growth model to calibrate the economy to Chinese data since 1952 and finds that measuring changes in total factor productivity between 1952 and 2005 can well capture the secular movements in the Chinese savings rate. Far from supporting the widespread belief that China’s savings rate is too high, this article argues that even thrifty Chinese “under-saved” for most of the years during this period; furthermore, the fiscal reforms of 1983 and 1985 further suppressed saving behavior, especially when initially implemented. In presenting such findings, this article at least partly solves the so-called “Chinese savings puzzle.”