Title: The State Transition Hypothesis of Economic Growth

Speaker: Fang Yi, Deputy Director, Professor, and Doctoral Supervisor of the Center for Quantitative Economics, Jilin University; also serves as a Member of the Financial Economics Professional Committee of the Chinese Economics Annual Conference, Director of the Chinese Systems Engineering Society, and Director of the Financial Systems Engineering Professional Committee of the Chinese Systems Engineering Society. He has long been engaged in quantitative economics research, with research fields covering complex economic systems, financial quantitative analysis, and quantitative investment. He has published many papers in domestic and foreign authoritative journals such as Social Sciences in China, Management World, Journal of Financial Research, Journal of Quantitative & Technical Economics, Systems Engineering Theory and Practice, Management Science, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Banking & Finance, and Journal of Empirical Finance.

Abstract: Explaining China's economic miracle since the reform and opening up is an important part of modern economics' understanding of the history of world economic development, and also a major challenge for economic theory research. Traditional economic growth theory is based on the equilibrium analysis framework, and its convergence hypothesis is based on the practice of developed countries, emphasizing that the economy converges to a single steady-state equilibrium; the 2024 and 2025 Nobel Prizes in Economics also focus on research explaining Western economic growth. However, China's economy belongs to a mandatory institutional change model with a significant role of the government, which is fundamentally different from the institutional premise of the convergence hypothesis.

Breaking through the traditional convergence framework, this study introduces synergetics and complex system theory into economic growth analysis, proposes the "state transition hypothesis of economic growth path jump", reveals the dynamic mechanism of state transition, establishes a non-equilibrium test method, and constructs the theoretical logic of "institutional change → innovation synergy → state transition", providing a new theoretical perspective for understanding the economic development path with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, based on data from 162 countries and regions around the world from 1960 to 2019, the study also identifies three differentiated economic growth paths determined by per capita income levels.

Date & time: 26 November 2025, 09:30

Venue: B321, Block B, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University