Surplus transfer and economic development in Taiwan and Shanghai

Abstract

We learn by comparing. Yet reality present us with few clear-cut comparisons. There are almost always mitigating factors. Nowhere is this more evident than in the comparison of economic and political systems. For example, the average citizen of the Soviet Union is poorer and politically more inhibited than a counterpart in the United States; but is this the inevitable consequence of Marxism(-Leninism), or is it because the Soviet citizen lives in a system descended from czarist serfdom, always relatively poor, always oppressed?