China's Innovation Challenge: Overcoming the Middle-Income Trap

The presentation will discuss Lewin's forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume that explores the concern that China will hit the middle-income trap by 2030. The lecture focuses on the question of whether China can undertake a transition to continue its economic growth to become a wealthy nation based on indigenous solutions that eschew massive social and political structural reforms based on models adapted from developed countries.

The book presents two scenarios for China's economic future. The first argues that China can build ever-stronger innovation capability and catch up with the most advanced economies as measured by gross domestic product per capita. The second makes the case that absent radical democratic reforms, existing Chinese political and economic institutions will inexorably relegate China to the middle-income trap. Unlike prevalent macro economic analyses the presentation discusses historical, cultural and institutional factors that collectively create the contradictions that China needs to resolve while also maintaining China Communist Party control.