Niv Horesh ("Broken model", July 20) says some developing economies succeed in picking winners by state control.
He notes China's recent economic success. But China's real gross domestic product scarcely moved between 1952 and 1977, rising just 3 per cent from 34 billion yuan to 34.9 billion yuan.
The one-party "governance" model collapsed China's economy through internal follies - Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution - so growth was from an almost zero base. Why should the world think that a good system?
Deng Xiaoping's Western-style economic incentives and exports to Western consumer societies helped China emerge from the collapse the Communist Party created.
It's ironic that free trade gave China its export-based wealth, weakening the US blue-collar worker, yet Professor Horesh criticises this spread of global wealth. Why does he think that using a Western economic model to rescue China from one party policy-making is evidence one party systems work?
Europe's citizens learned over decades, looking across the Iron Curtain, that centrally controlled "solutions" produce weaker results. Successful black swans such as Singapore don't change that reality. In Asia, some countries will choose vaguely neo-liberal solutions, others more collectivist ones. That's up to them - if they have the vote. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea all consigned their military strongmen to history, benefiting from a broadly Western model.