Piecemeal Labour Market Liberalisation and Entrepreneurship in China's Transition

Ziyan Yang and Jiakun Ma

Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 2026, vol. 34, issue 1, 23-43

Abstract: Existing studies argue that China's dual‐track approach to economic reforms offers lessons for other transition economies. Ignoring the piecemeal nature of the track‐merging process, the literature has not supported this theory empirically. We identify the impacts of China's piecemeal unification of the dual‐track job‐assignment system on entrepreneurship, arriving at three conclusions. First, the partial unification of the system has played as important a role as full unification in relaxing constraints on college graduates' entrepreneurship incentives. Second, the system encourages college graduates to take planned‐track jobs first and then traps them on the planned track through career‐path dependence, explaining the mechanism. Third, with respect to the three types of planned‐track jobs, the piecemeal merging completely eliminates bias towards college graduates associated with jobs in state‐owned enterprises and weakens their career‐path dependence while only partially correcting for bias associated with government and institute jobs without affecting career‐path dependence in those cases.

Date: 2026
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.12454

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:ectrin:v:34:y:2026:i:1:p:23-43

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics of Transition and Institutional Change from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().