I think it's foolish to pretend that we know the percentages that each one contributes. What proportion of the Chinese economy was generated privately versus publicly over this time period we're talking about in the last 40 years? And that's a somewhat answerable question. We know some measure of how many people left the countryside and went to the city. So these are all issues that are extremely, how should they say, the combination, recombination is unique and very challenging for us to understand.
Author and economist Branko Milanovic of CUNY talks about the big questions in economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milanovic argues that the Nobel Prize Committee is missing an opportunity to encourage more ambitious work by awarding the prize to economists tackling questions like the rise of China's economy and other challenging but crucial areas of scholarship. In the conversation, he lays out what those questions might be and discusses what we know and don't know in these areas.