 Two kinds of centralization: Divergences between China and EuropeLi Wang, Qing Wang, Yufei Zhang and Nobuaki Hori Economic Modelling, 2025, vol. 153, issue C Abstract: This paper develops a dynamic model of culture–politics–technology coevolution to explain the historical divergences between China and Europe. In China, rice cultivation and the monsoon climate generated high returns to large-scale infrastructure, encouraging collectivism and sustaining a steady trajectory of growing state centralization, which we call “cultural centralization”. In contrast, Europe’s wheat-based agriculture and oceanic or Mediterranean climate produced lower returns to infrastructure, preserving individualism and political fragmentation. Yet individualism also stimulated innovation and productivity growth, creating a non-monotonic path of centralization: an initial phase of decentralization followed by renewed centralization driven by technological advances, a process of “technological centralization”. Overall, our analysis shows how environmental conditions, cultural norms, and infrastructure productivity together shaped the contrasting long-run paths of political centralization and technological progress in China and Europe. Keywords: Collectivism; Individualism; Public infrastructure; Cultural transmission; Great divergence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:153:y:2025:i:c:s0264999325003104 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2025.107315 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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