The Anatomy of Meritocracy: Collective Career Incentives and Subnational Variations of Economic Growth in China

Abstract

While it is widely recognized that a country’s bureaucratic structure significantly influences economic growth, its subnational variations remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, this paper introduces a unique model to quantify the collective career incentives of subnational leadership in China. By adopting machine-learning techniques that incorporate 250 individual features, this study derives a predicted probability of promotion as a proxy to measure an official’s career prospects. The individual career prospects are subsequently transformed into collective career incentives through an inverse-U-shaped relationship between the two. The empirical findings indicate that from 1997 to 2015, Chinese provincial governments achieved higher economic growth rates when a larger proportion of officials held mid-range rankings in terms of career prospects. This study also finds that the better economic performance stemmed from the collective career incentives of provincial leadership, rather than those of the supreme leaders of the province.

Keywords:

• bureaucratic politics
• meritocracy
• political selection
• China

Notes

1 The data of individual officials in the analysis come from the CCP Elite Database (Lee & Shih, 2023). This database contains extensive biographical and career details of 13,377 SMPC positions, encompassing 3,946 unique SMPC who served during the period from 1982 to 2015.

2 Promotion in this study signifies the elevation of an SMPC member to a rank one level higher, such as moving from a rank-and-file position to vice party secretary, from vice party secretary to governor, or from governor to party secretary. Also, it entails a transfer to a central organization. It is important to note that promotions or transfers to nominal positions, such as the National People’s Congress and the National People’s Political Consultative Conference, are excluded from the analysis.

3 The economic data were compiled from the China Statistical Yearbooks published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonghyuk Lee

Dr. Jonghyuk Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science & Diplomacy at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). Previously, he served as an assistant professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Tsinghua University. Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.