ABSTRACT
At the end of the 1970s, after years of economic and political isolation, China started an enormous systemic transformation to turn around one of the world's poorest countries. At the beginning of reform, we now know that China was substantially poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa (Dollar, 2008). At that time, China's real gross domestic product per capita was behind all Sub-Saharan countries, except Ethiopia and Tanzania (CICUP, 2008).
