Policy Experimentation in China: the Political Economy of Policy Learning

The paper studies how China uses local policy experimentation to generate information and learn which policies work, and how political incentives shape this process. The authors assemble data on a large set of policy pilots across Chinese localities and link these to subsequent national policy adoption and local outcomes. They show that experimentation can facilitate policy learning, but the design and selection of pilots are influenced by political considerations, which in turn affects what is learned and which policies scale.