Professor Park will address the changes that have occurred in the Chinese labor market over the past quarter century, focusing on the extent to which labor market reforms have successfully created a well-functioning market for labor with a high degree of labor mobility. Like other rapidly growing developing countries, China has experienced rapid structural change featuring a steady flow of labor from agriculture to industry, and from rural areas to urban areas. As a transition economy, China has shifted gradually from planned allocation of labor in state-sector jobs to a more open labor market. Although the large magnitudes of these changes are impressive, reform of the labor market has been halting, uneven, and difficult, with much additional reform still required. Prof. Park will look at several dimensions of the Chinese labor market: labor allocation, wage setting, regional differences, and ownership sectors. He will conclude by discussing the key policy challenges that lie ahead.

Albert Park is Associate Professor of Economics and Faculty Associate of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center and chairs the faculty steering committee for Michigan's China Data Center. Dr. Park has been a visiting professor and researcher at Harvard University and Peking University, as well as other research institutions in China and Taiwan, and has served as a consultant for the World Bank on several projects analyzing economic development issues in China, including the Bank's current China Poverty Assessment project. Dr. Park earned a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics at Stanford University in 1996. His research interests include economic development, economic transition, labor, applied microeconomics, and the Chinese economy. He is involved in numerous collaborative research activities in China, including several large survey projects to study labor market developments in urban areas, and rural education, health, and labor outcomes. He has published over thirty journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, and is the coeditor of a forthcoming volume titled Education and Reform in China. At Michigan, he teaches a graduate course on the microeconomics of development and an undergraduate course on the Chinese economy.

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

Thomas Carothers is a leading authority on democracy promotion and democratization worldwide as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy generally. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project which analyzes the state of democracy in the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, international law, foreign aid, rule of law, and civil society development. He is the author or editor of six critically acclaimed books on democracy promotion as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. He is adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and serves on the board of various organizations devoted to democracy promotion.Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to launching the center, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, Birdsall was Executive Vice-President of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as Director of the Policy Research Department.

Ms. Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs. She has also written more than 75 articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals.

We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have "stolen" assets cannot be fully protected under a change in the legal regime towards "rule of law," and that the number of agents with control rights over assets is large. A demand for broadly beneficial legal reform may not emerge because the expectation of a legal vacuum increases the expected relative return to asset-stripping, and strippers may gain from a weak, corrupt state. The outcome can be inefficient even from the narrow perspective of the asset-strippers.