Gregory Chow's (1997) analysis, which he kindly shared with us in advance, notes with approbation that China is pursuing market socialism. Our first task is to define what we mean by market socialism. The New Palgrave (J. Eatwell et al., 1987) devotes five pages to a series of anecdotes about" market socialist" economies without ever giving a precise definition. Nonetheless, The New Palgrave and Chow's paper make clear that the term" mar-ket socialism" is meant to imply an economy in which the state owns most or all of the means of production but in which there is reliance on the market for determination of prices on most factors and some outputs. While formalizing the issue in this way may seem to provide clarity or even certainty, it does not. It merely suggests a process for es-tablishing a taxonomy for distinguishing among economies with different degrees of statism. The extent to which market socialism actually exists is an empirical matter.