Economic Dimensions of Autonomy and the Right to Development in Tibet

Andrew Fischer is a development economist and a PhD candidate at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics. Other publications include Poverty by Design: The Economics of Discrimination in Tibet, Montreal: Canada Tibet Committee, 2002, http://www.tibet.ca Return

See for instance http://www.unhchr.ch/development/right.html Return

For an excellent contemporary summary of these issues, analysed in the perspective of current international trade negotiations, see the UNDP sponsored book by Kamal Malhotra (editor and lead author), Making Global Trade Work for People, London: Earthscan, 2003. Return

For instance, see Jeffrey Sachs and Wing Thye Woo, 'Understanding China's Economic Performance', Journal of Policy Reform, 4 (1), 2000. Return

For an excellent discussion of the commodity traps of manufacturing processing, see UNCTAD, 2002 Trade and Development Report, Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2002. Return

The discussion and statistical information in this section has been taken from a forthcoming book by the author, Andrew Martin Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet: Challenges of Recent Economic Growth, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2004. Return

By 2001, subsidies were equivalent to 71 percent of GDP in the TAR and 27 percent in Qinghai, having increased by 136 and 160 percent respectively since 1998. In the TAR, the most subsidized province of the country, every yuan of GDP increase in 2001 was met by 2.1 yuan of increased government spending in the same year, 94 percent of which was subsidized. This in fact represents a remarkable inefficiency of subsidies, or a strongly negative elasticity of subsidies to growth. In Qinghai, the second most subsidized province, every yuan of GDP growth was met by 0.9 yuan of increased spending, 80 percent of which was subsidized. Return

Goodman noted this in his interviews with many Qinghai officials in 2001 and 2002. See David Goodman, 'Qinghai and the Emergence of The West: Nationalities, communal interaction and national integration', The China Quarterly, forthcoming in 178 (June 2004). Note that the situation would be even more extreme in the TAR. Return

The 'lucrative' is not to be underemphasized. While these areas have been cash starved for much of the reform period, it seems that since 2000, in particular in the TAR, there has been a flooding of funds, amounting to a project bonanza for those with connections. The bonanza works its way down the construction chain as each contractor takes advantage of the abundance of cash, relatively free from the supervisory regulation that would normally accompany such spending in other parts of China. For instance, it is common to overhear construction contractors in Beijing who have been working in the TAR swapping stories with much aghast about the delivery of poor quality materials, such as impure cement, and so forth. Return

Labour starts to become skilled from the level of secondary education onwards. According to 2002 population surveys, approximately 15 percent of the permanently resident population in the TAR (mostly Tibetan) had secondary education and above, and the proportion was the same for all Tibetans within China as a whole. In contrast, the equivalent measure in Sichuan was almost 50 percent and over 50 percent in China as a whole. This measure therefore corresponds well with the representation of Tibetans among staff and workers. For instance, over 70 percent of staff and workers in state-owned units in the TAR in 1999 were ethnic Tibetans, representing almost ten percent of the workforce. Added non-state corporate units and the small number of individually owned units that are mostly in the urban areas would probably account for the rest of the more educated 15 percent of Tibetans. Return

For instance, urban TAR incomes in 2001 were the seventh highest in the country, neck and neck with coastal provinces such as Fujian and Jiangsu. The poverty measures are taken from Athar Hussain, 'Urban Poverty in China: Measurement, Patterns and Policies', InFocus Programme on Socio-Economic Security, Geneva: International Labour Office, January 2003. Return

See http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/webcountry.nsf/VLUDocEn/China-ProgrammingFramework#1. Return