Over 2020-21, farmer protests in India turned into a movement provoked by the passage of farm laws designed to dismantle regulation of agricultural trade, provide a legal framework for contract farming arrangements, and facilitate corporate entry into agricultural production and trade. C.P. Chandrasekhar explains that despite intense farmer opposition, the government held out for almost a year after the movement began before withdrawing the laws. Chandrasekhar describes the factors underlying this stand-off by tracing the post-Independence evolution of agricultural and food policy and examining the political economy context of the positions adopted by the farmers and the government.

Although contemporary China has developed a distinct economic system, the analytic foundations underpinning China’s state–market relations remain unclear.  PERI researcher Isabella Weber and Hao Qi develop in this paper a conceptual framework of what they term China’s state-constituted market economy. They argue that the Chinese state ‘constitutes’ the market economy by creating, participating, and steering markets for essentials in order to stabilize and guide the economy as a whole. Then then draw on China’s statecraft tradition as well as on proposals for financial policy reform in the U.S. to conceptualize the state-market constitution in China.

Since 2017, China has adopted the "tolerant and prudent" policy in regulating emerging digital platform industries. Wei Zhang, Hao Qi and Zhongjin Li conduct an analysis for the cities of Nanjing and Beijing that finds that although these regulations can help reduce labor precarity in the marketplace for licensed drivers, they have exacerbated precarity in the workplace. This is because the ridehailing platforms aligned with third-party rental companies that provide licensed vehicles. This has forced drivers bounded by a rental or rent-to-own agreement to work significantly longer hours than counterparts who drive their own vehicles.

>> Watch interview from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)>> Learn more about "How China Escaped Shock Therapy." In an interview with INET's Rob Johnson, Isabella Weber discusses her new book on how China managed its transition from central planning to markets.