DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The Diverging Cases of China and Italy Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Y Nanetti Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century “All social and political systems need to evolve so as to survive and thrive, adapting to changing times and technologies Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Nanetti pose the right questions about our overly-rigid liberal democracies, while illuminating the challenge through a powerful comparison between their own sclerotic Italy and the currently more adaptive authoritarian China” —Bill Emmott, former Editor of The Economist and author of The Fate of the West “By now the literature on China is huge, yet this book stands out in terms of originality and quality China’s economic and technological advancement is systematically linked to its political system The comparison with Italy is useful to understand what Western democracies may learn from China’s case” —Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European Commission “This book compares China and Italy, providing a novel perspective The Chinese people need to find the future direction to maintain sustainable innovation and growth after 40 years of economic success China may draw some lessons from Italy on how to keep the balance between democratic governance and innovation Can we have Democracy promoting innovation and innovation promoting democratic governance at the same time?” —Liu Jianxiong, Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences “When considering matters of innovation and growth, great value comes from comparing case studies that differ significantly from one another Patterns that may be invisible in one single context can pop into view when carefully contrasted and compared This book occupies valuable terrain between long-term structural features, and medium-to-short-term adjustments subject to politics and policy manipulation It confirms Francesco Grillo’s and his coauthor’s unique capability to master different academic approaches to make sense of a problem which is going to be fundamental Their four-sided approach to explaining innovation is eminently applicable in these and other settings where stakeholders seek to advance innovation” —Ernest Wilson, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, Los Angeles, USA and visiting fellow at Stanford University, USA “This book offers an interesting view on how societies manage or mismanage innovation strategies in practice and how the wider political and institutional context acts as the intermediary in converting the stated policy goals into actual outcomes Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Nanetti show how liberal democracies could learn from other regimes in this conversion process without at the same time compromising their core principles Solutions to such fundamental problems are never simple, but the comparison of the Chinese and Italian case outlined in this book makes it apparent where one could start” —Mihkel Solvak, Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia “How can democracy can still benefit from a knowledge-based society? How and to what extent are our social systems increasing their ability to transform information into knowledge and wisdom as we need to face the big global challenges? This book addresses in a very original and provocative way some of the basic issues we need to face nowadays at the global level I strongly suggest this reading as one of the most interesting contributions to the international debate you can currently find” —Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director General for Education at UNESCO, Former Italy’s Minister of Education Universities and Research Francesco Grillo · Raffaella Y. Nanetti Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century The Diverging Cases of China and Italy Francesco Grillo Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa, Italy Raffaella Y Nanetti University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, USA ISBN 978-3-030-02013-2 ISBN 978-3-030-02014-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02014-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961426 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Cover illustration: View Stock/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my father the first to teach me that you are what you know —Francesco To take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress —James Wilson, Businessman and founder of The Economist Preface As Xi Jinping repeatedly reminds, China has still to “solve major difficulties” in order to transform an economic miracle that lasted four decades into a “moderately prosperous society in all respects” And yet it is extremely interesting to look at China when we are in search of solutions for a crisis of the West which is serious and deserves the best intellectual resources we are capable of In a nutshell, this is the reason which has made the authors invest energy and dive with enthusiasm into this book and has been the motivator for so many people who helped us in China, Italy and elsewhere with this research undertaking The age is gone when Western intellectuals used to come back from visiting a country supposed to be on the verge of developing what would have ultimately been ‘the perfect society’, saying that in Moscow even the snow was whiter Today there are no longer models to be exported and the Chinese leadership knows this better than many of his admirers China is a country governed by one of the best trained and selected political leaderships which has experimented innovative methods to develop policies and which is using technologies to solve problems in original and interesting ways We will argue that the Chinese approach ix x Preface to progress is one of the interesting methods to tackle the “innovation paradox” which is, as we will try to explain, one of the greatest challenges that define the twenty-first century And yet it is a leadership confronted by some major intellectual and political puzzles This work is an attempt to describe both the nature of China’s success and to better understand how it can continue to grow avoiding middle-income traps and solving those puzzles As a matter of fact, a key difference between today’s China and the Soviet Empire that fell in 1991 is the unique Chinese capacity to combine pragmatism and vision, humbleness and ambition They have the advantage of a framework they call “ideology” but this ideology is constantly tested and adapted through “practice” The other difference is that today the West is weaker than it used to be when it was challenged by the Soviet Union during the “cold war” or even by Japan at the start of the 1990s In terms of today’s challenges, China is strong relative to the West And yet in our work, we will argue that a stronger West suits China well The West is weaker not as much in terms of its economy; even though our research shows that our capacity to create prosperity from technological progress has declined We are weaker politically because we hold on to a mode of experiencing democracy which became obsolete in its participatory structures, while we are still a long way from providing an alternative theory on how complex societies should be governed Italy provides an interesting case as one of the core countries of the liberal democracy order which has been a pioneer of a wider European decline We offer an interpretation of the crisis which goes beyond analyses which seem to be short-sighted and recommend a framework for a “renaissance” which is still possible After all, Italy is the country where the idea of the West itself was arguably born through the vision of its artists and it is not a case that Italy has anticipated an economic, cultural and symbolic decline which is now shared by the countries partaking of the post war world order: France, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA Above all, the West is weak in terms of its current collective psychology, which is betraying the yearning to explore, that combination of Preface xi enthusiasm and curiosity which was powerful enough to define what the West is about The West used to make history; it is now waiting for history to happen sitting in front of the screen of a TV set This is why an intellectual travel to China is still what it must have been for Marco Polo at the sunset of the Middle Ages: one of the most effective ways to recover the memory of what we are about It should also be an opportunity for the East to better engage, void of reciprocal prejudices, with the West in the reflection on democracy of the future and its relationship with innovation and prosperity in the twenty-first century: a discussion which is going to be central in London, Rome and Brussels as well as in Beijing However challenging, it will be the debate of the next decade Essential for its consequences on the policies to be chosen and implemented, the relationships between people and institutions, the industrial and environmental strategies to be envisioned and pursued, the business ventures to be encouraged It will be crucial to learn from each other to navigate more wisely unchartered waters and to develop the intellectual instruments needed to make sense of a mutation that we still have to fully understand The objective of this book is to start a debate relevant for policy makers, public opinions and intellectuals and to offer fresh ideas—like the ones we offer at the end of sections on China and Italy, as well as in the concluding chapter—needed to move knowledge forward Pisa, Italy Chicago, USA Francesco Grillo Raffaella Y Nanetti 272 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti Much more controversial but to be discussed at some point is the requirement of (linguistic? administrative?) minimum skills that in a country like China are demanded to be a candidate Even in this case, the idea is not completely new considering that—in Italy and other countries—access to university and to most civil servant positions is conditional on passing an examination (concorsi ) (6) Flexible constituencies should be introduced to take on board new forms of citizenship One huge impact technologies are having is on the spatial organization of communities Until almost the end of the twentieth century, power, taxation, the creation of money, election, citizenship were organized by vertical layers: cities, regions, states which had created international organizations While the Internet coupled with globalization have changed everything, constituencies have stayed the same creating huge inefficiencies and injustices Somebody who lives by travelling through different cities and countries (which today is a rather common condition) has fewer possibilities to be elected than somebody who has kept on living in the same province This occurrence has created, on one hand, a global entrepreneurial class who has knowledge but is politically insignificant (aside from those who act as advisors and experts) And, on the other hand, a local political class which is, as our case on Italy demonstrates, far from understanding the global phenomena that are shaping the world but holds on to positions in parliaments and other institutions of representative democracy This misallocation of knowledge and power between classes erodes liberal democracy’s capacity to understand and solve problems Technologies create this imbalance but also provide some possibilities to solve it Voters may decide whether they want to continue to vote within a local constituency (default option) or to join national or European ones; the same possibility should be allowed to candidates People who live “on the move” may eventually find their own, mobile constituency 5 Knowledge Democracy as Key to Twenty-First Century 273 Already, electoral laws in many countries provide for a transnational constituency (citizens residing abroad) and many systems provide for votes to be expressed remotely The European parliament can and should be the place where such experimentation takes place, if Europe wants to overcome the current crisis by reviving its original purpose (7) Big data aided transparency to be transformed from an obligation to an active pursuit Transparency is—as for Fig. 1.4 where we theorized how the forms of democracy are evolving vis-à-vis the Internet—fundamental for citizens to express information based on data Most European countries have the obligation for administrations to publish the data necessary for their performance to be accounted for by citizens: but this is not enough It is not enough to publish these data on the small corner of a website information, in a language which many not understand and which is lost in huge amount of other data One crucial indicator of performance is to count how many of the citizens to whom an administration is relevant, actually access and use those data This will encourage governments to not only consider transparency as an obligation to be formally fulfilled, but a core objective to be pursued and with the aid of technology to detect relevant and understandable data States ought to so, anticipating times, before they are disintermediated by citizens getting information themselves from private and sometimes not reliable providers (8) Rule of law needs to be reconsidered with more accessible and more reliable access to the judiciary Another fundamental feature of democracy is the protection of the basic right of citizens to feel safe about the opinions they express and to access the judiciary system against the abuse of public administrations or the political majority in power While still in progress, the limit of the Chinese work on the “rule of laws” is that its interpretations ultimately depend on the will of the political leadership: should the quality of the ruling class deteriorate, 274 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti as it is already the case in many peripheries of the “Empire of the middle”, the entire system would be exposed to a crisis The limit of the European rule of law, and Italy is an extreme case of it, is that democratic institutions in their contribution to the implementation and interpretation of the laws were gradually replaced by the adherence to ever more formal procedures on the part of unelected bureaucracies which seem the negation of what Max Weber theorized In the reading and experience of citizens, laws have in time become disconnected from their rationale, while bureaucracies accountable to no one even physically appear to citizens as a simulacra of the State that was supposed to enforce those rules Thus, lack of accountability of bureaucracy turns into mistrust of the law The fight against non-sense bureaucracy is for the West as vital as the battle against corruption and abuse of power is in China (9) Social media are not for political debate and Europe could find an historical opportunity to relaunch itself by addressing the need for a neutral, open public space for debate American owned platforms have been the object of criminal charges in terms of unauthorized release of citizens’ private data China had, as we have elaborated, an important point not to allow its citizens’ information to be appropriated by private companies upon which it does not have any control However, the Chinese solution cannot be imported in countries where the power of the state is limited Europe could find an historical opportunity in promoting decentralized autonomous online organizations capable to overcome the limits of both types of giant social networks: this space is to be public (or regulated by the public) just as the roads, the railways, the squares were built as public infrastructure in the nineteenth century with the vital function of allowing the goods produced by that industrial revolution to be exchanged In this evolving context, under new regulations that are beginning to be discussed and proposed in the EU, positively minded hackers may even become a tool to counter violations of privacy (and even intellectual property) when they happen within social 5 Knowledge Democracy as Key to Twenty-First Century 275 networks Today, participation in digital debates comes at the expense of other fundamental rights, which not only is damaging per se but may discourage the more informed individuals to join Thus, the debate on social media and political manipulation should urgently move beyond the powerless lament-without-proposal on “fake news” and “hate speech” Doable mechanisms should be put in place so that whoever publishes content is responsible of what is “posted” Such mechanisms should be required of social media operating in Europe In the liberal tradition, freedom of speech and responsibility are related and this relationship should apply to the complex and now less controlled virtual space Were this to happen, citizens would access vetted information and participate in public debates expressing informed opinions Only then, would platforms contribute to fair political debates and more effective decision-making Such platforms would be an essential component of a “checks and balances” liberal democracy system to correct the asymmetries that are creating distrust and may ultimately kill social media themselves (10) The education imperative Most importantly democracy, and the efficiency and quality of all the mechanisms through which democracy lives depend on citizens who have the skills to select and process information and actively participate Liberal democracies will ultimately depend on how much investments they are willing to make on the human capital which is necessary to survive and prosper in the robots’ age, but also to join a collective problem-solving process Italy is extreme in its spending on pensions (which is technically an entitlement to those who have left the labour market), four times more than what its spends on education (from kindergarten to universities) which is an investment in the future: this is depressing Italy’s long-term potential growth even more than it does currently However, all other Western countries spend at least twice more in protection than in human capital For the survival of democracy itself, this imbalance needs correcting Not less drastic are the 276 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti changes needed in the composition of the expenditure in education, beyond its absolute value A semester of study in another European country as a mandatory part of the curricula of students both at secondary and tertiary levels is necessary for Europe to firm up citizens’ European identity—as a continental demos to be added to the national ones, as for Kalypso Nicolaidis notion of demoicracy (Nicolaïdis and Howse 2002)—without which Europe fails Democracy will only be saved by reshaping its mechanisms, our sense of community, the priority we give to knowledge and only if we defeat the inertia which may take the crisis of a big idea beyond the point of no return The development of the “democracy of the future” will, however, have to start with doable wins so that consensus can be built and to so by learning on the job, as John Dewey would have recommended today By incremental steps, the aim is to develop an intelligent and self-learning social system: the stake for democratic countries and their communities is to press forward with faith in progress as achievable to insure diffused prosperity; acting forcefully as they did in the post-World War II past but today without losing control over the new technologies that create progress through civil society’s cumulative knowledge These ideas need further research, tests in real-life cases and strong networks of innovators 5.4 Limits of Our Investigation and Areas for Further Research The questions that our research has addressed are ambitious and we have argued that they are central to the future of civic society in liberal democracies where the effort is the difficult adaptation to a technology-driven revolution promising to be more encompassing than the previous four in the last five centuries of the history of mankind However, ambition calls for awareness of the limits of our investigation In this section of the chapter, we elaborate on such limits Complex questions require a convergence of different academic inputs For example, the inquiry into the tri-polar relationship between 5 Knowledge Democracy as Key to Twenty-First Century 277 democracy, innovation and growth crosses necessarily at least political science, innovation management and political economy We have drawn from these bodies of literature, but our own respective sectoral expertise may well have not touched on all the relevant information We trust that this limit be a point of the debate on knowledge democracy for growth that we hope to render more active Complex questions require to go beyond academia In our research, we have been guided by the belief that our direct engagement with firms and governments is also indispensable To have a first-hand sense of what technologies can and of the scope of the organizational challenges that they pose, we have carried out two case studies employing field work In spite of lessons learned from them, we acknowledge the limits of the case study approach Complex questions require thinking outside the box To this end, last but not least, in our inquiry about what kind of democracy the twenty-first century demands, we have wanted to challenge ideological positions and to single out prejudices in political behaviour that are constraining liberal democracies in their path to become knowledge democracy Thus, we sided with the pragmatism of John Dewey in adding to our work a dimension of common sense to understand the realities that we observed Some of our readers may find this addition not legitimate Moving from the admissions of limits, we believe that the questions posed call for an expansive research agenda which needs to be shared by researchers interested in arriving at more final answers to them Our commitment is to study China further, a country too massive, too different, and in part too mysterious to our Western eyes to be sufficiently understood in the months spent on the field work As pointed out in Chapter 3, China is a parallel universe, a fascinating world in evolution which deserves much more time, as it shows its unique capability to combine modernity and embedded tradition, future and memory in a government led travel towards an utopia which has still to pass We are, also, aware that the comparison between China and other Asian countries which are or have been similarly successful can be very useful to gain understanding: the parallel between China and Japan may, indeed, be a promising one Our commitment as both researchers and citizens is also to study the Italian case further The challenge that our country faces is fiercer, so 278 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti that the structural changes it has to make in the ways in which its institutional architecture operates and, even more so, in the ways in which it poorly connects with citizens as innovators and as community members are daunting But our investigation has uncovered positive signs of renaissance and not unexpectedly at the grass-roots level In addition to the evidence for Italy as a whole of increased anomie with the consequential loss of social capital and of economic stagnation, our investigation has found a myriad of cities and towns where the historical patrimony of community solidarity values and creativity is alive and it is now making those urban territories economically competitive, institutionally participatory and socially inclusive The reference to the “laboratory of the future of democracy” was partial and yet useful after the comparison between the two extreme case studies We are developing research plans with Estonian and Australian colleagues at the Tartu University and in Melbourne We hope to also work at sub-national levels and carry out studies to be themselves experiments of mechanisms for smart specialization Ideas that have been developed in this work need concrete tests to be assessed, so that “practice” can inform the draft of the theory of what “knowledge democracy” should be like The Socrates’ paradox (“I know that I know nothing” as Socrates may have said as for Xenophon’s account in Apology in the fourth century BC) is, indeed, key to the advancement of human knowledge especially in times of radical transformations which seem to erode the relevance of the intellectual instruments we were accustomed to We have put forward some of the ingredients of a recipe that we still not have However, for those who strongly believe in democracy as vital to most of the problems still unsolved, there is no alternative but to continue this undertaking 5.5 Marco Polo and the Spirit of the West In 1271, an eighteen-year-old son of an Italian merchant set off to Asia from Venice together with his father and uncle After 8000 km travelled across civilizations and cities of which the West had lost memory, he 5 Knowledge Democracy as Key to Twenty-First Century 279 reached the capital of a kingdom which Marco Polo used to mention as Catai, which, at that time, accounted for one-third of what we would now call uninspiringly the world GDP In Beijing, he and his family, as foreign ambassadors coming from the West, were welcome with the highest honours and Marco could develop a much interesting friendship with the emperor himself As a matter of fact, Kublai Kahn was not even Chinese; he was Mongol and belong to the only not Han ethnicity which has ever ruled China As the nephew of the warrior who had conquered the greatest empire in history,10 the emperor was conquered in his turn—like the Romans had been by the Greek—by the sophisticated culture of a country that seemed to have been endowed with everything humans could hope for When Marco came back from his fantastic travel after 25 years, he shared his memory with his comrade Rustichello da Pisa whom he encountered in a prison in Genoa and Rustichello wrote these stories of voyage and learning in a book (Il Milione ) which became the first best seller after the invention of that printing machine which is one of the inventions we referred to when we compared the current industrial revolution with other transformations of the past Cristopher Columbus himself sailed towards the West convinced that the world to encounter would be the East Seven and half centuries after that great story of human curiosity and inquiry, the decline of the Geist of the West is mostly about the loss of that instinct of exploration which has defined the notion of the West better than any economic recipe The decline is about the betrayal of Marco Polo, James Cook and Neil Armstrong; of an idea anticipated by Xuanzang and shared by Yuri Gagarin It is about the loss of enthusiasm (one of the most beautiful words inherited from classical Athens—entheos—meaning inspired by the God of wisdom and curiosity) which is being replaced by cynicism It is, also, however about the growing mistrust in the reason upon 10Temüjin also know as Genghis Khan did manage to create in his life time the largest contiguous empire in history It was even larger than the one conquered by Alexander the Great three centuries BC 280 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti which we founded a civilization that brought refrigerators, electricity and longer lives to people Mistrust in reason as the way to solve problems which, we have argued, has become the malaise of an elite before spreading to ordinary people Most of the economic and social indicators we have presented in this book—low investments, stagnating productivity growth, widening gaps between expectations and results—are just the consequence of what somebody (Krugman) called people’s personal depression Yet, we still have unlimited possibilities Progress which is the accumulation of knowledge across generations today affords possibilities unimaginable until a few decades ago Societal possibilities much bigger than what the publicity of high-tech devices conveys There are young graduates looking to make an impact, women who need to respond to concrete everyday family and work challenges, migrants with a dream, elderly with gift of ingenuity who have energy that the West needs But at the moment it appears that we are paralyzed We are discovering a dark side of technologies that we simply cannot handle because we have lost, as Thomas Elliot wrote, knowledge into an ocean of information we are unable to make sense of The decline of the West is represented by the average Western citizen who has been grown accustomed to display his political dimension almost exclusively sitting in front of a TV set or of an I-Phone Paradoxically, even colonialism with its mostly negative connotations was a side effect of that instinct towards exploration Dis-engaged, as citizens today we sit in front of a monitor waiting for somebody else to make a history that we only “like” or “comment” on Few decades ago people, especially young people, were emotionally and often personally involved in events taking place thousands of kilometres faraway, as European student demonstrations in the sixties against the Vietnam War or the tanks in Prague attest Today Europeans are too often just spectators of wars happening all around the shore of the same Mediterranean sea that they share with North Africa and the Middle East As this book is about the relationship between democracy, innovation and growth, we have argued that it is fundamentally about the inadequacy of the intellectual instruments that we keep using and the lost 5 Knowledge Democracy as Key to Twenty-First Century 281 sense of community which up to a recent past made us citizens feel that we partake of a common destiny If the convergence of computer science, biology and physics is rendering possible the dreams that Western philosophers have dreamt of, it can also bring gently the West to the loss of the memory of itself Travelling towards the East is once again one of the most effective ways to remind ourselves as Westerners where we come from with our culture of democratic achievements It is along the road travelled by Marco Polo that we can reaffirm our values and at the same time draw 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Athens (democracy of ) 35, 38 Australia 13, 27, 73, 78, 84, 155, 253, 256–258, 262, 263, 265, 266 B Belt and Road Initiative 117 Berlusconi, Silvio 167, 169, 173, 196 Brexit 23, 25, 44, 116, 260 Cities (Chinese) 11, 100, 105, 110, 137, 141, 155, 157 Cities (Italian) 201, 236, 265 Civil society 2, 3, 12–14, 17, 21, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42, 45, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 76, 78, 87, 103, 106, 129, 174, 187, 199, 204, 211, 217, 229, 231, 255, 265, 276 Communist Party of China (CPC) 43, 44, 50, 85, 87, 91, 94, 95, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 126–133, 135, 137–140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 158, 268 Confucianism 148–150 Corruption 41, 86, 104, 109–111, 167, 194, 274 C Canada 13, 18, 78, 84, 90, 155, 158, 253, 256–258, 262, 265, 266 D Debt 111–113, 167, 172 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 F Grillo and R Y Nanetti, Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02014-9 283 284 Index Democracy paradox 11, 13, 242 Diffused intelligence 13 Direct democracy 51, 171, 222, 258, 260, 261 Dis-engagement 233 G Globalization 29, 32, 58, 59, 75, 84, 89, 105, 114–117, 224, 225, 232, 272 H E Education 12, 18, 30, 46, 59, 61, 67, 92, 99, 152, 180, 181, 185–189, 195, 205, 211, 217, 225, 232, 270, 275, 276 Efficiency 24, 27, 33, 71, 73, 86, 125, 139, 157, 165, 169, 184, 192, 204, 205, 207, 210, 217, 255, 267, 275 Electric cars 99, 101, 107–109, 142–144, 155, 173, 190 Electronic Voting 258, 260, 261, 267, 269 Elites 20, 25, 41 Environment 87, 100, 103, 105, 107, 109, 125, 130, 156, 183, 189, 268 Establishment 24–26, 94, 200 Estonia 13, 73, 78, 84, 145, 253, 256, 258, 260, 261, 265–269 European Union (EU) 2, 113, 116, 155, 168, 173, 227, 228, 267 Exports 114, 115, 117, 148, 155, 157, 168, 209, 213, 244, 249, 251 F 5SM 47, 171 Free trade 115, 116 Hanergy 85, 107 Healthcare 97, 103, 135, 158 Human Capital 94, 139, 154, 170, 172, 179, 180, 183, 184, 208, 232, 233, 271, 275 I IFLYTEK 85, 144, 145, 154 India 6, 20, 27, 86, 87, 91, 92, 95, 99, 110, 115, 121, 148, 151 Inequality 23, 24, 26, 58, 59, 119, 143, 149, 152, 175, 183 Innovation 1, 5, 6, 12–15, 18–20, 26–28, 33, 38, 48, 58, 61, 62, 67–72, 76, 83, 85–88, 97, 99, 101–104, 118, 120, 129, 131, 132, 135–137, 142, 146, 148, 153, 154, 156–158, 165, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 183, 189–192, 199, 201–205, 208, 211–219, 224, 225, 230, 231, 234, 236, 242–246, 248, 250–253, 255, 256, 260, 261, 263, 266–268, 277, 280 Innovation paradox 6, 13, 29, 30, 33, 40, 86, 153, 158, 192, 242, 264 Index 285 Internet 4, 6–9, 12, 21, 22, 25, 28–30, 32, 36, 39–45, 47–52, 57, 59, 61–65, 86, 97, 98, 124, 126, 127, 129, 141–143, 145–147, 171, 173, 209, 223, 231, 242–244, 247, 254–256, 261, 262, 272 Investments 12, 24, 28, 69, 70, 102, 108, 110, 113, 120, 124, 125, 141, 143, 146, 152, 157, 167, 171, 186–191, 196, 205, 208, 211, 217, 243, 244, 271, 275, 279 M J N Macron, Emmanuel 21, 29 Mani pulite 167, 168, 196 Mao Zedong 99, 165 Merkel, Angela 265 Marx, Karl 123, 125–127, 134, 136 Marxism 15, 125–127, 130 Meritocracy 113, 129, 137–141, 244 Model cities 67, 201, 203, 205, 213, 214, 251 Monti, Mario 170, 191 Movimento Cinque Stelle 170, 171 Multi-level governance 229 Japan 11, 18, 25, 27, 73, 85, 89, 90, 101, 113, 117, 123, 124, 148, 152, 155, 156, 177, 186, 277 Jinping, Xi 87, 90, 96, 99, 104, 105, 110, 111, 122, 123, 137–139, 146, 156 NEET 180, 181, 211, 226, 232 NIO 85, 142, 143 K P Knowledge democracy 2, 13, 33, 34, 124, 129, 134, 146, 153, 241, 242, 252, 256, 264, 277, 278 L League 25, 116, 130, 167–171, 193 Letta, Enrico 170, 191, 192, 212 Liberal democracies 3–6, 12–16, 18, 19, 23, 27–29, 40, 50, 58, 59, 63, 65, 73, 75, 76, 85, 110, 128, 148, 165, 175, 192, 194, 220– 222, 225, 241, 244, 245, 247, 255, 256, 264–266, 275–277 Liberalism 14, 15, 126, 155, 241 O One child policy 86, 99, 122, 158 Participatory Democracy 37, 38, 247, 250, 258, 262, 263, 268 Pension system 97, 122, 170, 184, 185, 195 Polo, Marco 83, 152, 173, 278, 279, 281 Populism 23, 25, 29, 86, 116, 153, 170, 174, 178, 187, 193, 197, 201, 221, 228 Poverty 18, 20, 24, 85, 87, 88, 94–97, 118, 120, 128, 132, 157, 224, 225 Prodi, Romano 17, 103, 113, 168, 230, 234 Public Debt 167, 170, 176, 191 286 Index R T Referenda 20, 39, 42, 47, 51, 258–260, 268 Renaissance 4, 26, 29, 39, 179, 199–201, 211, 212, 228, 231, 234, 243, 278 Renewable energy 107, 108, 211, 214 Renzi, Matteo 170, 175, 191 Research and development (R&D) 69, 70, 107, 143, 185, 186, 244 Robots 7, 9, 98, 114, 117, 135, 145, 154, 198, 218, 225, 275 Technological revolution 3, 13, 26, 39, 45, 61, 83, 102, 184, 229, 242, 246, 264, 266 Trump, Donald 23, 25, 85, 116, 117 S Silicon Valley 97, 98, 102, 231 Smart participation 13, 14, 33, 34, 41, 42, 52, 123, 158, 201– 205, 229, 233, 242 Social capital 3, 32, 52, 57, 59–62, 65–68, 71, 188, 193, 200– 203, 208, 215, 217, 219, 222, 225, 226, 230, 232, 252, 278 Social exclusion 30 Social inclusion 202, 216 Socialism 14, 83, 124, 125, 134, 136, 140, 148, 264 Social mobility 24, 58, 175, 188, 200, 202 Switzerland 13, 51, 78, 84, 253, 256–258, 260, 261, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271 U Unions of municipalities 206 United Kingdom (UK) 9, 20, 22, 24, 25, 31, 44, 90, 113, 116, 126, 177, 178, 188, 221, 226, 227, 260 United States of America (USA) 2, 3, 9–11, 18, 22, 23, 25, 31, 44, 51, 59, 83–85, 89, 90, 93, 98, 101, 111, 115, 117, 118, 120, 137, 145, 151, 152, 156, 177, 188, 221, 224–226, 244, 245 W The West 2–6, 10, 11, 13–15, 17, 18, 21–23, 25–28, 32, 75, 84, 85, 87, 88, 102, 103, 116, 118, 119, 123–125, 152, 156, 172, 173, 176, 186, 195, 235, 242, 243, 245, 248, 249, 255, 256, 258, 265, 268, 274, 278–281 X Xiaoping, Deng 120, 122, 123, 128, 134–136, 154 ... Former Italy s Minister of Education Universities and Research Francesco Grillo · Raffaella Y. Nanetti Democracy and Growth in the Twenty- first Century The Diverging Cases of China and Italy Francesco... authoritarian China —Bill Emmott, former Editor of The Economist and author of The Fate of the West “By now the literature on China is huge, yet this book stands out in terms of originality and quality China s... of the China International Publishing Group with whom he shared very inspiring conversations and whose organization set up most of the meetings in Beijing in the first field work; Chen Jian of