Balanced development: Maoist conception and Chinese practice

This paper explores the economic reality behind the balanced development aspect of the Chinese development strategy more thoroughly than has been done previously. Firstly, it introduces material from the Wan-sui volumes to shed more light on its economic ideology, but mainly it uses the recently available macroeconomic information about the Chinese economy to examine how empirically the policy was put into effect, what its implications were for the intersectoral allocation of investment, choice of technologies, etc., and what its effects were in terms of incomes and employment. A final section compares the strategy with the ‘balanced growth’ policies of Western economic literature and the ‘harmonic growth’ advocated by Kornai.