China's Prospects for Catching Up

1957 E Street Northwest,Washington DC 20052

11 May, 2022

Description

Learn more about China's prospects for catching up and escaping the middle income trap in an era of massive GVC repositioning with Keun Lee. China's Prospect for Catching Up: Escaping the Middle-Income Trap in an Era of Massive GVC Repositioning This book launch seminar will feature remarks from Keun Lee, Professor of Economics at Seoul National University and author of the newly published book: China's Technological Leapfrogging and Economic Catch-up: A Schumpeterian Perspective. Keun Lee is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. He is an editor of Research Policy, an associate editor of Industrial and Corporate Change, a council member of the World Economic Forum since 2016 and Vice Chair of National Economic Advisory Council of Korea. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. About the book: After the miraculous economic growth known as the Beijing Consensus, China is now facing a slowdown. The attention has moved to the issue of the middle income trap, or the situation in which economic growth slows down as a country reaches the middle income stage. China's Technological Leapfrogging and Economic Catch-up: A Schumpeterian Perspective deals with this interesting issue in the context of China. It also discusses China’s limitations and future prospects, especially after the rise of a new “cold war” between China and the US, namely the question of whether China would fall into another trap called the “Thucydides trap,” or conflict with the existing hegemon as a rising power. In sum, this book plays around three key terms, namely, the Beijing Consensus, the Middle Income Trap, and the Thucydides trap, and applies a Schumpeterian approach to these concepts. This book also conducts a comparative analysis that examines China from an “economic catch-up” perspective. An economic catch-up starts from learning and imitating a forerunner, but finishing the race successfully requires taking a different path along the road. This act is also known as leapfrogging, which implies a latecomer doing something different from, and often ahead of, a forerunner.