How is China acquiring global influence? Based on findings from his forthcoming book, Richard Carney shows that countries in which political leaders rely more heavily on clientelism coupled with greater control over the corporate sector display a higher demand for Chinese infrastructure spending. These two characteristics are most prevalent among autocracies that hold semi-competitive elections. This in turn contributes to elevated levels of Chinese digital technologies imports to these countries which facilitates the spread of Chinese technical standards, enabling China to create the scale to assert its dominance over the emerging digital economy. Because semi-competitive autocracies are the most prevalent type of political regime, they are essential partners to China’s global ambitions.
Richard Carney engages in political economy research with a focus on business-government relations. He is the author of Authoritarian Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize for work on the Asia Pacific. The framework developed in the book was used for a paper on corporate social responsibility which won the best paper award in emerging economies research at the 2018 Academy of International Business Annual Meeting. His next book, China's Chance to Lead, will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press. He has published numerous articles in international business, finance, and political science journals such as the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of International Political Economy. Richard is also an advisor to the World Bank for its flagship project ‘Businesses of the State’. Presently, Richard is at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.
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