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The future of development: Lessons from China’s success (and failures)

The future of development: Lessons from China’s success (and failures)

Shanta Devarajan and Ranil Dissanayake, Center for Global Development, 26 August 2021

It’s hard to overstate just how dramatic China’s economic growth and poverty reduction have been. Between 1979 and 2018, Chinese GDP per capita (measured in 2011 international dollars, and thus comparable in terms of purchasing power across countries and time) increased by more than six times; by comparison the UK’s less than doubled. And this was not simply concentrated among the richest—poverty declined so substantially, contributing so much to the global trend in poverty that Our World in Data were moved to produce a graph to show that the global decline in poverty was not solely a Chinese phenomenon.

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