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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
CHINA’S EMBRACE OF GLOBALIZATION∗
Lee Branstetter
Nicholas Lardy
Working Paper xxx
http://www.nber.org/papers/wxxx
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
July 2006
∗ This paper is part of a larger research project, China’s Great Transformation: Origins, Mechanisms,
and Consequences of the Post-Reform Economic Boom. We are grateful to the project editors, Loren
Brandt and Thomas Rawski, and to participants at the University of Toronto and University of
Pittsburgh conferences on China’s economic transition for comments and suggestions. We
particularly thank Yasheng Huang and Barry Naughton for detailed comments on an earlier draft.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
©2006 by Lee Branstetter and Nicholas Lardy. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to
exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including
the © notice, is given to the source.
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China’s Embrace of Globalization
Lee Branstetter and Nicholas Lardy
NBER Working Paper No. xxx
July 2006
JEL No. O53, O19, F43, F14
ABSTRACT
As China has become an increasingly important part of the global trading system over the past
two decades, interest in the country and its international economic policies has increased among
international economists who are not China specialists. This paper represents an attempt to
provide the international economics community with a succinct summary of the major steps in the
evolution of Chinese policy toward international trade and foreign direct investment and their
consequences since the late 1970s. In doing so, we draw upon and update a number of more
comprehensive book-length treatments of the subject. It is our hope that this paper wi