Steven N. S. Cheung - Contribution To Economics and China's Economic Development

Contribution To Economics and China's Economic Development

Chueng's contribution to economics and China's economic development can be roughly grouped in the following areas,

  1. New Institutional Economics
    1. how different kinds of contractual arrangement affect transaction costs, which are often ignored by neoclassical economists
    2. realizing the importance of transaction costs (as Cheung often mentions in his writings, if there is no transaction costs (the original starting point assumption by Coase), there is no difference in using different institutional arrangements (e.g. market or government)).
    3. the nature of the firm (a government, to a certain extent, is a firm and can be more efficient than the market in some areas),
  2. Methodology
    1. emphasis on economic explanation (according to Cheung, economic explanation is the ONLY objective of the study of economics);
    2. the analysis of relevant and observable real world constraints: Adam Smith's tradition,
    3. downward sloping demand curve: Neoclassical tradition,
    4. theories must be potentially refutable but not yet refuted (Cheung considers many mainstream concepts not observable, leading to the non-refutable nature of many theories (such as utilities, welfare))
    5. focus on capturing the underlying and relevant constraints to explain economic phenomena that might seem odd and strange on the surface.
  3. China's economic development
    1. Considerable influence among the Chinese speaking population (most of his work after 1982 are written in Chinese);
    2. Prediction of China's institutional reform (which, in general, has been quite accurate)
    3. Analysis of the deficiencies in the Chinese state owned enterprises


Read more about this topic:  Steven N. S. Cheung

Famous quotes containing the words contribution to, contribution, economics, china, economic and/or development:

    “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.”
    —Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)

    “If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer’s contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.”
    —Eric Bentley (b. 1916)

    “Women’s battle for financial equality has barely been joined, much less won. Society still traditionally assigns to woman the role of money-handler rather than money-maker, and our assigned specialty is far more likely to be home economics than financial economics.”
    —Paula Nelson (b. 1945)

    “It all ended with the circuslike whump of a monstrous box on the ear with which I knocked down the traitress who rolled up in a ball where she had collapsed, her eyes glistening at me through her spread fingers—all in all quite flattered, I think. Automatically, I searched for something to throw at her, saw the china sugar bowl I had given her for Easter, took the thing under my arm and went out, slamming the door.”
    —Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    “... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
    —Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)

    “If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
    —Arthur Miller (b. 1915)