The World’s First Meritocracy Through the Lens of Institutions and Cultural Persistence
James Kai-Sing Kung ()
Additional contact information
James Kai-Sing Kung: The University of Hong Kong
Chapter 7 in The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative Economics, 2021, pp 159-184 from Springer
Abstract:
Abstract China was the first in the world to have developed a meritocratic bureaucracy in the form of keju, a civil exam system through which top government officials were selected on a competitive basis. As an institution, keju provided room for social mobility as evidence shows, although “family background” also mattered. More interestingly, keju nurtured a culture of valuing learning and educational achievements that persists to this day in terms of higher human capital and entrepreneurial outcomes as proxied by years of schooling and occupational choice. However, a potentially worrying sign of this persistence is local elite entrenchment, as keju culture is transmitted via the channels of educational infrastructure, social capital, and political elites alongside human capital, suggesting meritocracy may have cast a “long shadow”.
Keywords: Meritocracy; Evolution; Civil exam (keju); Institutions; Cultural persistence; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
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:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-50888-3_7
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030508883
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-50888-3_7
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().