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Since the implementation of reform and opening up, China has made remarkable achievement in terms of economic reform and development. China’s path, as well as its experience, has simultaneously gained worldwide concerns. Developing the market economy against the backdrop of socialism brings conclusions from China’s achievement, deepens knowledge of China’s pathway and builds a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. That is the way to realise a basic socialist system, especially with regards to the organic integration of public ownership and market economy. This combination determines the future of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the success or failure of economic restructuring. Therefore, it requires consideration and in-depth study. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The goal of economic restructuring is to establish and develop the socialist market economy. Its main content can be summarised in two parts. The first is the relationship between plan and market or government and market. The second is compatibility or combination of public ownership and market economy. The former is one of the superficial problems, relevant to resource allocation method or economic operation mechanism. The latter stems from deep-rooted problems, represented by ownership or the underlying economic system. These two work together to form the organic integrity of socialist market economy where both similarities and contrasts coexist.

The shared ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the lofty goals of communism will then become empty words. In this sense we can say that, whether we can realise the unity and opposition between public ownership and market economy and better integrate advantages of socialist system with strengths of market economy, will to a large extent determine the future and destiny of the socialist market economy.

As previously mentioned, the relationship between plan and market or government and market are part of resource allocation methods or economic operation mechanism. Compatibility and combination, however, with public ownership and market economy are part of an ownership or basic economic system. Science reveals the nature and developmental law of the socialist market economy. An in-depth study must be conducted on the relationship between public ownership and market economy.

Since the core issue of Chinese economics is to elucidate the logical relationship between socialism and the market economy, it necessitates a robust foundation for microeconomic analysis to uncover the behavioral patterns and characteristics of microeconomic agents in a socialist market economy and identify the conditions and methods for the functioning of market mechanisms.

The core issue of microeconomics with Chinese characteristics is to identify the economic logic of how market mechanisms play a decisive role in resource allocation under the basic socialist economic system based on China's reform.

The core issue in building the foundation of microeconomic analysis of Chinese economics is addressing the compatibility issue between SOEs and a market economy.

In the author’s view, this can be achieved under the logic of classified reform so as to build the microeconomic foundation for the effective functioning of a socialist market economy.

This paper is a response to the doctrine that capital is incompatible with public ownership. The fundamental characteristics of modern productivity determine the co-existence of the market economy and capital relations.

Socialism can neither bypass the market economy nor “go beyond capital”; capital appears in two historical forms, including the private capital and the public capital. Public capital is the inevitable outcome of the inherent contradictions of public ownership in a socialist market economy.

It represents an economic relationship that compels individual labourers to provide surplus labour for the society. The combination of the strong accumulation function of public capital and the improvement of people's welfare is the main cause of China's development miracle.

The innovation impetus of the public capital and its “immunity” to the capitalist crisis highlight the tremendous power of socialism with Chinese characteristics in breaking free of the shackles of capitalism and continuously developing productive forces. Public capital demonstrates and will continue to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of socialism.

In the process of reform, although every landmark theoretical breakthrough is marked by the speech of the highest leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) or the decision of the CPC National Congress, each breakthrough is attributable to the theoretical contribution made by the academia of political economy. Notably, these theoretical breakthroughs invariably embrace innovations in the discourse system of political economy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The innovations and breakthroughs thereof have led to the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The success of China’s economy highlights the superiority of the socialist economic system and development path with Chinese characteristics.

These major breakthroughs are accompanied by breakthroughs in relevant theories, which constitute a synthesis of a series of major theoretical innovations in political economics.

What is the relation between the land system with Chinese characteristics and the country's high-speed economic growth in the past decades? There is a lack of rigorous academic research based on the general equilibrium theory of macroeconomics on this issue.

By building a multisector dynamic general equilibrium framework with land system, this paper explores how the land supply mode with Chinese characteristics affects China's economic growth as well as its transmission mechanism.

This paper confirms the importance of land system with Chinese characteristics in explaining the mystery of China's high-speed economic growth. Counterfactual analysis shows that if China adopts a land system similar to that of other developing countries, GDP will drop 36% from the current level under the baseline model.

As the industrial sector shrinks relatively and the output elasticity of infrastructure decreases, this inhibitory effect will become more apparent. China should improve its land supply mode, especially expand the supply of commercial and residential land and reduce the cost of land in the service sector. This can promote better economic development in the future and thus improve household welfare and the structure of aggregate demand, replace “land-based public finance” and thus inhibit the “high leverage” risks of local governments.

As an essential part of mainstream Western development economics, the trickle-down theory originates from the behavioral choices and iterations of thought on conflicts of interest in the evolution of remuneration structure in Western countries. The fundamental flaw of the logic of this theory is that it conceals the inherent implication of social systems and the essential characteristics of social structures.

This paper examines the relationships among economic growth, income distribution and poverty from the perspective of social relations of production – the nature of production relations determines the nature of distribution relations and further determines the essence of trickle-down development, and ownership is the core mechanism for realizing the trickle-down effect.

The stagnation or smoothness of the trickle-down effect in different economies is essentially subject to the logic of “development for whom”, which is determined by ownership relationship.

To be more specific, “development for capitalists” and “development for the people” indicate two distinctly different economic growth paths. The former starts with private ownership and follows a bottom-up negative trickle-down path that inevitably leads to polarization, while the latter starts with public ownership and follows a top-down positive trickle-down path that will lead to common prosperity in the end.

The purpose of this paper is further leveraging the advantages of the basic socialist economic system and exploring the realistic way of transforming the advantages of the socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics into governance efficacy. At its Fourth Plenary Session, the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) elevated the socialist market economy system to China's basic economic system, further affirming the significant advantages embedded in the socialist market economy from an institutional perspective.

The essence of the basic socialist economic system consists of the ownership structure with public ownership as the mainstay, the income distribution system with distribution according to work as the mainstay and the socialist market economy, which are interrelated, supportive and reinforcing mutually, forming an organic whole.

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, it has been proven through practice that the basic socialist economic system has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing rapid economic development and social stability. The system not only corresponds to the development level of the productive forces in the primary stage of socialism in China but also demonstrates its strengths in eliminating polarization between the poor and the rich and achieving common prosperity.

It is necessary to make the basic economic system more coordinated and consistent and be committed to the philosophy that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts to form a systemic synergy, so as to achieve synergistic enhancement of institutional advantages and governance efficacy.

The socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics reflects the characteristics of ushering into a new era, and the research object thereof shifts to productive forces. Emancipating and developing productive forces and achieving common prosperity become the main theme. Wealth supersedes value as the fundamental category of economic analysis.

The theoretical system of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics cannot proceed from transcendental theories but is problem-oriented. Leading problems involve development stages and research-level problems.

The economic operation analysis is subject to the goal of optimal allocation of resources with micro-level analysis focused on efficiency and macro-level analysis focused on economic growth and macroeconomic stability also known as economic security. The economic development analysis explores the laws of development and related development concepts in compliance with laws of productive forces. The new development concepts i.e. the innovative coordinated green open and shared development drive the innovation of development theory in political economy.

Accordingly, the political economy cannot study the system only, but also needs to study the problems of economic operation and economic development. Therefore, the theoretical system of the political economy tends to encompass three major parts, namely economic system, economic operation and economic development (including foreign economy). The basic economic system analysis needs to understand the relationship between public ownership and non-public ownership, between distribution according to work and factor payments, and between socialism and market economy from the perspective of coexistence theory, thus transforming institutional advantage into governance advantage.

The purpose of the paper is to describe and analyze differences in patients' quality perceptions of private and public primary care centers in Sweden.

The article explores the differences in quality perceptions between patients of public and private primary care centers based on data from a large patient survey in Sweden. The survey covers seven dimensions, and in this paper the measure Overall impression was used for the comparison. With more than 80,000 valid responses, the survey covers all primary care centers in Sweden which allowed for a detailed analysis of differences in quality perceptions among patients from the different categories of owners.

The article contributes with a detailed description of different types of private owners: not-for-profit and for profit, as well as corporate groups and independent care centers. The results show a higher quality perception for independent centers compared to both public and corporate groups.

The small number of not-for-profit centers (21 out of 1,117 centers) does not allow for clear conclusions for this group. The results, however, indicate an even higher patient quality perception for not-for-profit centers. The study focus on describing differences in quality perceptions between the owner categories. Future research can contribute with explanations to why independent care centers receive higher patient satisfaction.

The results from the study have policy implications both in a Swedish as well as international perspective. The differentiation between different types of private owners made in this paper opens up for interesting discussions on privatization of healthcare and how it affects patient satisfaction.

The main contribution of the paper is the detailed comparison of different categories of private owners and the public owners.

Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.