A New Economic Growth Engine for China: Escaping the Middle-income Trap by Not Doing More of the Same

This volume is a report by leading international economic experts on China's economic priorities in the coming years. From various aspects of the domestic and foreign situation, China has now reached a critical juncture in its economic development. Unless China is able to overcome the difficulties in undertaking further reforms in the next ten years, China would be caught in the middle-income trap and be unable to become a modern country. The future course of China's economic development is also of great concern to the rest of the world because the socio-political-economic conditions in China will have significant impact on global economic prosperity and on global political harmony.

The book is a product of close collaboration between the School of Economics at Fudan University and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. They cover a new paradigm for growth, short-term demand management, institutional reforms for middle-term growth, and strengthening the fundamentals for long-term growth.

Wing Thye Woo is Professor at University of California at Davis, Executive Director of the Penang Institute in Malaysia, Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Distinguished Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, and Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University. His current research focuses on the East Asia economies, and he is now coordinating the work of three international research teams that will submit in 2012 reports on (a) Redesigning the Global Financial Architecture for the 21st Century; (b) The Key Economic Policies for Sustaining High Growth in China; and (c) Ranking the Livability of the Major Cities in the World.

Ming Lu is Professor of Economics and Director of Center for Industrial Development Studies at Fudan University, China. He has worked as a Fulbright Scholar, and Wertheim Fellow at Labor and Worklife Program of Harvard Law School and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also Research Fellow of Peking University-Lincoln Institute and Adjunct Professor of Zhejiang University. He has consulted for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Fudan University. His recent research covers Labor Economics (income distribution, and migration), Regional and Urban Economics (urbanization, and regional development) and Social Economics (social network and economic development).

Jeffrey D Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, 2008), and The Price of Civilization (Random House, 2011).

Zhao Chen is the Deputy Director and Professor at the China Center for Economic Studies (CCES), Fudan University. His research interest covers Development Economics as well as Urban and Regional Economics. Currently, he works on following topics including entrepreneurs' political participation, Hukou system and rural-urban migration, inter-industrial wage differentials. He has published in publications such as the Journal of Comparative Economics, Review of Income and Wealth and International Small Business Journal.