About Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — universally known by its initials, IWEP — is a constituent research institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in CASS's Academic Division of International Studies. Its official brief introduction states that IWEP was founded in 1964 and is devoted to the study of international economics and politics. The fuller history is one of merger: a World Economy unit was one of the fourteen founding units of CASS in 1977, an Institute of World Politics was created in the academy's first expansion, and in December 1980 part of the Institute of World Politics and the Institute of World Economy were combined to establish the Institute of World Economics and Politics. It researches the global macroeconomy, international finance, trade and investment, international development, international politics, foreign policy, international political economy and global governance; publishes five periodicals including World Economics and Politics and The Journal of World Economy, plus the English-language China & World Economy; manages two national academic societies; and serves the Chinese government as a think tank on the world economy and international affairs from its address at 5 Jianguomennei Dajie, Beijing 100732. It is distinct from CASS itself, and from every sibling institute: no other CASS institute joins world economics and world politics in a single organisation.

Origins in 1964: the Institute of World Economy

One of IWEP's predecessors, its official history records, was the Section of World Economy of the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. According to instructions given in 1963, the Institute of World Economy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was formally established on 19 May 1964. That founding predates CASS itself by thirteen years, and its original mandate was practical and governmental: the major tasks of the Institute of World Economy at its establishment were to provide each department of the central government with reports and reference materials about the world economy and to serve economic construction in China. In 1977 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was formally established, based on the former Division of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the world economy institute became one of its subordinate institutes; CASS's official history indeed lists the Institute of World Economy among the fourteen founding units of 1977. From early on, IWEP's history notes, its researchers provided important reference for China's economic reform and opening up, and for choosing economic development paths, through reviewing and introducing foreign economic systems, reforms, policies, development strategies and practices. A world economy institute founded to inform a largely closed economy thus found, after 1978, a second vocation: explaining the outside world's economic systems to a China that was opening to them.

December 1980: world economy meets world politics

The institute in its present form dates from the merger. CASS's official history records an Institute of World Politics among the new institutes created in the academy's first expansion of 1977–1981, and notes that World Politics was later amalgamated with the Institute of World Economy to create the Institute of World Economics and Politics. IWEP's own history gives the precise form and date: in December 1980, part of the Institute of World Politics and the Institute of World Economy were combined to establish the Institute of World Economics and Politics. The word part matters — this was a recombination of research capacities, not a simple renaming. The resulting institute was built on an analytical conviction that has since become familiar under the name international political economy: that world markets and world politics cannot be understood apart from each other. December 1980 was early for such an institutional bet anywhere in the world, and IWEP's own journal publishing shows its effects, as a later section describes: its flagship journal treats international relations theory, world politics, security, international organisations and the world economy within a single set of covers. The institute's present name, its eleven-division structure and its dual mandate all descend from that 1980 combination.

What IWEP studies: from global macroeconomy to global governance

IWEP's brief introduction defines its field as policy-oriented and theoretical research mainly covering the global macroeconomy, international finance, international trade, international investment, international development, international politics, foreign policy analysis, international political economy, the world political economy of Marxism, global governance, and international commodities and security studies. The list repays reading as a map. Its economic half runs from the world economy as a whole — growth, cycles and macroeconomic coordination — through the connective systems of finance, trade and investment, to development, the field concerned with how poorer countries grow. Its political half runs from international politics and the foreign policies of states to security studies, including the international commodities questions — energy and raw materials — where economics and security meet. Between the halves sit the explicitly bridging subjects, international political economy and global governance: how states, markets and international institutions jointly order the world. No other CASS institute holds both halves. The Institute of Economics studies China's economy, the area institutes study their regions, and the National Institute of International Strategy studies strategy; IWEP alone is charged with the world economy and world politics together, as global systems.

Research divisions and disciplinary construction

The institute's organisation has been repeatedly adjusted to its field. Its brief introduction counts, at the time of that account, a staff of about 130 across eleven research divisions, five editorial offices, six research centres and its administrative offices, and notes that it also manages two national academic societies. An earlier account in its history describes the disciplinary adjustment of October 1998, undertaken according to the actual needs of China's reform and opening up, the conditions of the institute and international standards: eight research sections were founded, for international finance, international trade, statistics and modelling, multinational corporations, industrial policy, world economy, international relations and international strategy. That 1998 list shows the institute re-sorting itself around the subjects globalisation was making urgent — multinational corporations and international finance alongside the older world-economy core, and international strategy alongside international relations. The same account records that the disciplines of world economic statistics, international trade and international politics were combined into Key Disciplinary Development Projects of CASS, and that the institute attaches great importance to disciplinary development and to the gradual integration of its research work with international standards. Its staff profile in that earlier account — 105 in-service staff, among 82 professional personnel 25 senior fellows, 26 researchers holding doctorates and 32 holding master's degrees, with seven doctoral supervisors and ten master's supervisors — portrays a mid-sized, senior research institute, comparable in scale to the largest CASS institutes but organised around a global rather than a national subject.

Five journals, two yearbooks and China & World Economy

Publishing is IWEP's most visible public function. Its brief introduction lists five academic journals: World Economics and Politics, monthly; The Journal of World Economy, monthly; International Economic Review, bimonthly; China & World Economy, bimonthly and in English; and The Yearbook of World Economy, annually. To these its history adds two annual edited volumes known by their cover colours, the Yellow Book of International Economy — Analysis and Forecast of World Economic Situation — and the Yellow Book of International Politics, a report on international politics and security, both commended, the institute notes, by the reading public. The flagship, World Economics and Politics (Shijie Jingji yu Zhengzhi), was launched in March 1979, according to its journal page, with its title inscribed by Li Tieying, a former president of CASS; it describes itself as a general academic monthly on international economics and politics that combines theory with practice in probing the strategic issues of the politico-economic world. Its columns span theories of international relations, world politics, non-traditional security and China, China and international organisations, overseas perspectives from acknowledged overseas scholars, and the world economy. It received the Excellent Periodicals Award for 2002 and 2005 from CASS and, its page records, topped the citation lists of international politics journals in the Chinese Core Periodicals Index, the Citation Report of Chinese Academic Journals and the Chinese Social Science Citation Index of the mid-2000s. It has also sponsored national academic conferences and organised the CASS International Forum. China & World Economy carries the institute's work to English readers; scholarly publishing records date its launch to 1993 and list the Institute of World Economics and Politics among its organisers, published with Wiley — making it one of China's longest-running English social science journals. Gregory Chin, Margaret Pearson and Wang Yong, introducing a 2013 Review of International Political Economy special issue on international political economy with Chinese characteristics, identified World Economics and Politics and International Economic Review, both published by CASS through IWEP, among the five or six leading journals in China publishing IPE work, and noted the rising share of IPE articles in the flagship under editors Wang Yizhou and, from 2009, Zhang Yuyan.

Research output, projects and awards

The institute's history provides unusually concrete output figures. According to incomplete statistics quoted there, from 1977 to 2005 the scientific research results completed by IWEP included over 230 monographs and over 7,510 academic papers and research reports. From 1977 to 2003 it undertook three state major projects in the period of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, three in the Seventh, three in the Eighth, one in the Ninth and one in the Tenth; since the Seventh Five-Year Plan period it undertook 17 ordinary projects for the National Social Science Fund, three youth projects, 18 major projects for CASS, 38 key projects for the academy, and a series of bidding, youth and basic projects. Since 1981, the same account records, 93 of its results won awards at ministry level or above, or academic special awards. The figures convey the institute's dual character: monographs and journal papers for the academy, and a steady stream of reports for government — the original 1964 mandate, to supply central government departments with reports and reference materials on the world economy, continued inside CASS as think tank work. Its history concludes that, as a state research institute for world economics and international politics, IWEP has made due contributions as a think tank for the government, that the Party and state attach great importance to it, and that it occupies an important position in academic circles and enjoys a good reputation.

Centres, societies and international exchange

IWEP administers a constellation of research centres and learned societies that extends its reach beyond its own divisions. Its history lists the centres established by or affiliated with it: the World Economy Research Center of CASS, the Third World Research Center of CASS, the Research Center for International Finance, the US Economy Research Center, the Global Merger and Acquisition Research Center, the China Center for Corporate Governance, the World Economic History Research Center and the World Economy Development Research Center. Its brief introduction adds that the institute manages two national academic societies — the China Society of World Economics is named on its site among them, together with the Chinese Research Society of East European and Central Asian Economy in the history's centre list. On exchange, the institute conducts researchers' short-term visits abroad, receives foreign scholars, holds international academic symposia regularly and irregularly, sends researchers for advanced study abroad, undertakes international cooperative studies and holds biweekly ambassador forums — sessions at which serving ambassadors address its researchers. It has established good communication and cooperative relationships with the United Nations and its organisations and with universities and scientific research institutions in many countries. For an institute whose subject is the world, such machinery is not decoration: ambassador forums, UN links and foreign partnerships are channels through which the primary material of its research — the policies and thinking of other states — reaches Beijing.

Graduate education and the cultivation of talent

IWEP educates through the Department of World Economics and Politics at the Graduate School of CASS, offering doctoral degrees in world economy among its programmes, as its brief introduction records. Its history quantifies the earlier record: from 1978 to 2006, the Department of World Economics and Politics cultivated 145 master's students and 105 doctoral students, and from 1993 to 2006 the mobile postdoctoral station established in IWEP accepted 34 postdoctoral researchers. Those numbers, spread over three decades, indicate the institute's model — small cohorts of advanced researchers trained inside a working research institute, rather than mass teaching. The brief introduction names Professor Zhang Yuyan as director; Zhang, trained originally as an economist, is identified in the Review of International Political Economy's account as both head of the institute and lead editor of its flagship journal from 2009, and as one of the leading forces for international political economy in China — a combination that again expresses IWEP's fused identity, an economist directing an institute of economics and politics and editing the journal where the two meet.

Why IWEP is distinct among CASS institutes

Set against its siblings, IWEP's distinctness has three layers. Institutionally, it descends from a 1964 academy institute founded to report on the world economy to the Chinese government, inherited by CASS in 1977, and fused in December 1980 with part of the Institute of World Politics — a genealogy no other CASS institute shares. Intellectually, it refuses the separation of economics from politics at the global level: its research list deliberately places the global macroeconomy, finance, trade and investment beside international politics, foreign policy, security and global governance, with international political economy as the named bridge. In output, it speaks through an unusually complete publishing house of its own — two Chinese monthlies, a bimonthly review, an English bimonthly published internationally since the 1990s, a yearbook and two annual yellow books of analysis and forecast — as well as through reports to government in the tradition of its founding mandate. Its address, 5 Jianguomennei Dajie, Beijing 100732, places it in the same central Beijing CASS quarter as several sibling institutes, but its subject is the opposite of local: the whole world economy and the whole of world politics, studied from Beijing for Chinese scholars and decision-makers. That is the profile that belongs in a world directory under this name — not the parent academy, not a journal, not a university school, but the merged 1980 institute that has carried the study of world economics and politics in China for more than four decades, and in its world-economy line, since 1964.