The Razor's Edge: Distortions and Incremental Reform in the People's Republic of China
通过分析中国改革历程，说明在部分改革的经济体中，扭曲会催生更多扭曲：地方政府为获取计划体制遗留的租金而发展高利润产业，进而设置区域贸易壁垒，导致国内市场分割和区域生产偏离比较优势。
In a partially reformed economy, distortions beget distortions. Segments of the economy that are freed from centralized control respond to the rent-seeking opportunities implicit in the remaining distortions of the economy. The battle to capture, and then protect, these rents leads to the creation of new distortions, even as the reform process tries to move forward. In this paper I illustrate this idea with a study of the People's Republic of China. Under the plan, prices were skewed so as to concentrate profits, and hence revenue, in industry. As control over factor allocations was loosened, local governments throughout the economy sought to capture these rents by developing high margin industries. Continued reform, and growing interregional competition between duplicative industries, threatened the profitability of these industrial structures, leading local governments to impose a variety of interregional barriers to trade. Thus, the reform process led to the fragmentation of the domestic market and the distortion of regional production away from patterns of comparative advantage.