Yang Yao (; born 11 November 1964) is a Chinese economist, academic and author. He is a professor, director of China Center for Economic Research and Dean of National School of Development at Peking University. He is the executive director of the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development and is an editor of China Economic Quarterly. Yao is also appointed by Ministry of Education as Cheung-Kong Scholar Chair Professor.
Yao's research is primarily focused on economic development and institutional change in China. He has published over 100 research papers and is the author or co-author of books including China's Private enterprise, Economic Reform and Institutional Innovation and CSR and Competitiveness in China, among others.
Yao is the recipient of several awards such as Sun Yefang Economic Science Award and Pu Shan Award. He is a member of China Economists 50 Forum and is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at Robert Bosch Foundation.
Education
Yao received his bachelor's degree in geography and his master's degree in economics from Peking University in 1986 and 1989, respectively. In 1996, he completed his Ph.D. studies in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Career
After the completion of his Ph.D., Yao joined Peking University's China Center for Economic Research as an assistant professor. In 1999, he was promoted to associate professor and to a professor in 2002.
Yao has also held administrative appointments along with academic appointments. In 2006, he served a five-year term as the director of the Management Committee at the Institute for Social Science Survey. Yao was appointed, by the Peking University, as the director of China Center for Economic Research in 2010 and as dean of the National School of Development in 2012. He took up a position of executive director at the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development in 2016. Yao has also taught as a visiting faculty at several universities including International University of Japan, Stanford University, New York University and University of Washington. He taught as a visiting professor at Aichi University and University of Melbourne during the 2010s. He was a visiting scholar at the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition in 2015.
Yao often writes in various magazines and newspapers including The Economist, China Daily, Project Syndicate and Financial Times. He has also been involved with several public projects having a global impact. In late 2019, Yao, along with Jeffrey Lehman and Dani Rodrik, co-convened a 'US-China Trade Policy Working Group' to devise possible solutions for the US-China trade relationship. Yao and the working group issued a joint statement and proposed a new way forward to resolve the trade conflicts between USA and China.
Research
Yao has conducted extensive research on the development economics, political economy and institutional change in China.
His early research includes his study on political processes and the institutional change. He presented an impossibility result for the efficiency hypothesis of institutional change in a general economic setting and a well behaved political process. By combining the social choice literature with the institutional literature, he studied the formative role of political processes in institutional changes. Yao's main institutional research focused on China's economic transformation since 1978. He explained the contemporary concepts regarding institutional changes and then presented the alternative approach to these concepts. Yao explained the general model of China's institutional transition, and proposed a formal model of institutional change involving ideological evolution and actual actions of change. He also explained the two phases of institutional changes.