Justin Lin, the Chinese economist who was, until recently, chief economist of the World Bank, has written a book that is as remarkable as it is ambitious: its aim is to show the route to economic development. This is ambitious, because it has been the holy grail of economics since its inception. It is remarkable, because he largely succeeds. One does not have to accept everything Lin argues to recognise that he has made an invaluable contribution.
The salient attribute of Lin’s way of thinking is practicality. As an admirer of China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, he, too, does not care if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. He recognises the decisive contribution of market forces. But he also argues for the role of government in prodding those forces in the right direction. Only thus, he argues, can countries make the long journey from poverty to prosperity.
More precisely, the book promotes a “new structural economics”. This is to be distinguished from the old structural economics, which influenced economists in the 1950s and 1960s, and the neoclassical economics of the faculty at the University of Chicago, where Lin studied in the 1980s.