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The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has invited Professor Justin Yifu Lin, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, to present a public lecture on “Development and Transition: Idea, Strategy and Viability” on campus today (31 March).

Professor Lin is the first Chief Economist of the World Bank from a developing country, and the first Chinese assuming this position. Being an expert on economic development and particularly agriculture, Professor Lin plays a crucial role in advising the World Bank on developing world issues.

In most developing countries after World War II, governments adopted policy measures to promote industrialization. At that time, most economists were expecting to see rapid growth in resource-rich countries in Africa and Latin America, but the real success stories appeared in East Asia, where the endowment of natural resource was extremely poor.

The various institutions that hinder economic development in most former socialist and developing countries today are shaped by their governments, which followed inadequate ideas about giving priority to the development of capital-intensive heavy industry in the 1950s when capital was lacking. The failure of many former socialist and developing countries to achieve dynamic growth in their transitional process is due also to their governments' specific transition strategies which were based on inadequate ideas that ignored the existence of large amounts of non-viable firms in the economy.

In the lecture, Professor Justin Lin shared his scholarship with over 400 CUHK staff, students, alumni and members of the political and commercial sectors. He analyzed why the dominant social thinking about the modernization of developing countries in the 1950s and their transition in the 1990s was incorrect, and how they shaped government policies and established institutions in the developing countries. Professor Lin also discussed why the governments of a few economies in East Asia managed to escape the influence of the dominant social thinking in the 1950s, and why China and Vietnam did not follow the transitional approach advocated by the dominant social thinking in the 1980s.

The lecture was broadcast live to local universities, CUHK Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Community College and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, as well as Peking, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Tsinghua, Zhejiang, Nanjing and Sun Yat-sen Universities on the mainland. It was also available on the Hong Kong Education City web site. The broadcast is intended to promote academic exchange and allow more people to benefit from the lecture.

Professor Lin is Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University. Among many of his public roles in China, Professor Lin is Vice Chairman, Committee for Economic Affairs of the Chinese People’s Political Consultation Conference and Vice Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He is representative of the Eleventh National People’s Congress. He also serves on several national and international committees, leading groups, and councils on development policy, technology, and the environment.