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.