Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1149.

Directors: Pierre Francois Landry; Susan Rose-Ackerman; Frances McCall Rosenbluth.

This study grapples with the causes and effects of changing political ties bonding central political authority and the subnational units under growing economic openness. Prevailing economic theories predict inevitable national-level political decline with trade openness. I argue that in institutional settings imparting greater central political sway, the political center has incentives to tighten control over the winner subnational regions in a global market in order to extract resources, perform interregional redistribution and maintain central rule. Such targeted political centralization, however, has mixed macroeconomic consequences. I illustrate these general arguments by examining the political response of the Chinese central state to the country's ongoing integration with the world market, and the consequences of the evolving central political grip for domestic governance.

Drawing upon both fieldwork and provincial-level time-series cross-section data for 1977--2002, I show how Beijing has sought, via the ruling Communist Party, to strengthen political control over the provinces thriving in foreign trade. I go on to investigate the effects of central political control in two realms during this era: domestic market fragmentation and provincial economic growth. Tightened political control remedies collective-action problems and encourages the provinces to engage in less economic local protectionism; it also hampers provincial economic growth through facilitating central resource extraction, undermining its "credible commitment" to local property rights, and distorting local incentives. Divergent outcomes in the two areas highlight the perennial intrinsic tradeoffs between effective state intervention conducive to sound governance of the market and excessive state redistribution and predation deleterious to economic development.

While its implications can enrich discussions on China's ongoing transition, the primacy given by my research to the role of nationally cohesive political parties will also be germane to the broader debates on the fate of state sovereignty, intergovernmental conflicts, and the economic role of political institutions in the age of globalization.