Deliberation In Chinese And Indian Central Planning Bureaucracies

Abstract

This dissertation offers a different interpretation of the causes for the successful rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies in the contemporary period by placing both cases in the same analytic framework. Guided by formal game-theoretic models of information exchange, the historical analytic narratives document how the development and subsequent transformation of these two economies was managed under the auspices of their respective Central Planning Commissions. I first re-examine the developmental period, beginning in the early 1950s, when both nations inaugurated their Soviet-inspired central planning apparatus. While traditional treatments of such planning emphasize its poorly realized economic goals, I focus on how planners established bureaucratic institutions of deliberation and information flow from the regions to the center. These information flows allowed the central government in both of these countries to better coordinate domestic economic policy through the procedural infrastructure erected by these mechanisms. In China and India, the organization of the Central Planning bureaucracy solved a coordination dilemma across regional interests. This allowed for the generation and evolution of a national consensus on fundamental questions of how the economy should grow: in what direction? With what goals? With what speed? Establishing what priorities? And, realized at what cost? These difficult questions were funneled through the discussions behind the annual and longer term Five Year Plans so that leadership from different regions could effectively coordinate their preferences on these matters of vital national interest. I then extend the framework and analysis into the contemporary period of economic liberalization. Although these two regimes differ on almost all of the formal features of their polities, they have both successfully liberalized their closed economies without significant political opposition. In fact both nations have witnessed the evolution of a broad-based national consensus in favor of the reforms. I argue that this transition was made possible since it occurred at the behest of the enduring institutions of deliberation within their central planning hierarchies, which not only established the foundations for rapid contemporary growth, but continue to manage this change even as the old levers of planning and central command have all but evaporated from the scene.