China is currently developing a market-based model of society own type. The Chinese government says that it plans to use the mechanisms of capitalism to build socialism. The economic freedom is therefore attached no end in itself, but it is merely used as an instrument for achieving social and economic goals, after all the other instruments had failed until the end of the 1970s.
For this reason, the Chinese leadership apparently sees no contradiction is to exploit certain economic liberties, social and political freedoms to the citizens but also to withhold strict. The latter irritates the observer from Europe and North America, has developed in the Western liberal tradition since the Enlightenment, an understanding that economic freedom is inextricably interwoven with the personal freedom. In other words, personal and social freedom without economic freedom does not have to. From this insight came in the West – although well known, with many conversions and false starts – at the end of a more comprehensive understanding of freedom, the potentially most important characteristic is that freedom is not explicitly seen as a tool to achieve higher goals, but as an end in itself. Now it seems to be a fortunate coincidence that economic freedom is not only an essential requirement of universal freedom, but also the prerequisite for economic prosperity and wealth. So it happens that only people in market economies, which are enjoying prosperity and wealth, which is noted for the record, that market economy is not a sufficient, but is probably a necessary condition for prosperity. According to Western observers, it seemed only natural that a modern market economy must be accompanied not only by narrow and economic freedoms granted from above, but with his personal freedom and democracy must ultimately connected with.
The American economist Robert Barro
But showed more than ten years ago, that there is no convincing empirical evidence that prosperity in the form of high per-capita income, democracy requires. But there is regularly a very close correlation between the per capita income of various countries and the level of democracy. This finding is very convincing especially in the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as noted at the beginning of this decade, the Eastern European expert Anders Aslund. Those ex-socialist countries, which were so successful on the path to a market economy, were not only those countries which had the largest welfare gains, but also those countries which have developed the most stable democracies. This included some economists and political scientists that the market economy can survive without democracy principle, but that climb with increasing prosperity, the demand for democracy – democracy in the language of economists is thus a superior good. For some observers, this theory could in turn show empirical evidence. And since those Eastern European countries, which rapidly both market economy and democracy was introduced, at the same time those countries were, which had at the beginning of the system change the highest per capita income, it is their timely dedication not only to a market economy, but also to democracy explain it well.
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Categories: World