Hodgson, Geoffrey M., and Kainan Huang. “Brakes on Chinese Development: Institutional Causes of a Growth Slowdown.” Journal of Economic Issues 47, no. 3 (2013): 599-622. doi:10.2753/jei0021-3624470301.

This journal article notes the multiple factors responsible for vastly accelerating Chinese economic growth since the 1980s, but is aimed at explaining the factors that have and will impede that growth. The authors argue that despite China’s remarkable explosion in GDP, unless the country addresses certain institutional factors its growth will be unsustainable. The institutional factors are namely “demographic shifts and the problem of supporting a larger dependent population; the lack of a developed institutional—legal and financial—foundation for indigenous, advanced private enterprise; and the severe developmental constraints inherent in the existing system of land rights and residency registration” (600). To summarize, the major points are China’s one-child policy, impediments on capitalist private enterprise, and the cultural/economic/political divide between rural and urban populations. I would identify the first factor as demographic and the last two factors as organizational data. To collect this data, the authors primarily relied on public and private records. The authors commonly cited the US Census Bureau and the National Bureau of Statistics in China. The authors collected other data from various other sources; (BBC, Wikipedia, Chinese constitution) however, most of the empirical data came from Bureaus and Governmental agencies. Data for economic trends were quantitative, thus when analyzing GDP and macro-scale trends, I agree with the authors that the best way to collect this data is to look at public and private records. While the authors could have gone to China and asked farmers, businessmen and politicians for in-depth interviews this research would have been tiresome and ineffective. In order to explain China’s overall growth (a hard task to accomplish) the best method seems to be piecing together the data from numerous databases.