To address the research questions - How has the Chinese government been able to produce a successful reform process and what logic has been behind it? - I develop a politico-economic framework that is largely based on a public choice model by Frey and Eichenberger (1992) and a politico-economic research methodology by Bates and Kreuger (1993). Its basic assumption is that all individuals, including bureaucrats and autocrats, maximise their own power and money subject to constraints. Secondly, it assumes that, when a new leadership rises to power, it will try to start an economic reform process in order to secure its power position. Per reform period, economic reform plans are analysed on their intended effect, implementation and actual results in pure economic terms as well as in political terms (leadership's power position). The framework hypothesises that during a reform process a government will perform a constant balancing act between the political viability with the economic rationality of each individual reform measure. This hypothesis is testedJand the Chinese reform period 1978-1995. The constraints Deng Xiaoping's leadership faces are the Communist Party's rule, a very strong bureaucracy, management of state enterprises and military, the command economy with an agricultural commune system and a revenue dependency on state owned enterprises. The hypothesis largely holds for China: agricultural reforms start with liberalisation to be later on largely retracted; real state owned enterprise reforms are never implemented; rural industrial reforms boom after tax revenues could be withheld at local level; the military's civilian industries is thriving. Unwanted results are quickly changed or retracted in the following period. Also identified is that despite these efforts, unintended interlinkage effects between the different reform measures become increasingly important and difficult to assess, resulting in a great loss of power for the leadership.

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This dissertation constructs a computable general equilibrium model for Ghana using the social accounting framework. The model is used to examine the macroeconomic effects of policies that alter the sectoral terms of trade in the Ghanaian economy. The study shows the macroeconomic effects at a greater level of disaggregation for this country than previous studies on the Ghanaian economy and achieves this through using updating techniques to construct social accounting matrices for three periods. / The results show that though improvements in the terms of trade for the Cocoa sector through currency devaluations, increases in the domestic price of exportables or through lower export taxes are critical to correcting the trade and government budget deficits however, excessive changes in these variables are destructive in their effects on sectors that rely on domestic demand for growth.

Graduation date: 1971

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Michael Trebilcock.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept of Economics,1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-307).

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 1999. / Bibliography: leaves 256-319.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-82).