制度-垄断地租与中国地方政府竞争:一个马克思主义分析框架

竞争性地方政府作为改革以来形成的重要制度形式,在相当程度上决定了中国社会主义市场经济体制的特点。本文不仅承续了既有文献中将地方政府的经济动机归于租金,并将土地财政视为地方政府利用租金开展战略投资的观点,而且试图在一个马克思主义框架内进一步发展这一观点。为此我们对租金的生产性利用和国家的经济作用的关系做了初步探讨,并将大卫·哈维的制度-垄断地租理论运用于分析中国地方政府围绕营建环境的投资活动。本文的基本结论是,中国地方政府在以土地财政为核心的战略投资中,充当了租金的生产性分配者和使用者的角色,并因之嵌入了原本由企业之间的竞争所带来的相对剩余价值生产过程,形成了中国经济特有的相对剩余价值生产双重结构,从而在相当长的时间内造就了世所罕见的高投资率,推动了中国经济的持续快速增长。

The Institution-Monopoly Rent and Competition Between Local Governments in China:A Marxist Framework of Analysis

As an important institutional form since the reform,competitive local governments are to a large extent the defining characteristics of China’s socialist market economy and also one of the main reasons why China’s market economy is different from other types of market economy.This article follows on the view in the existing literature that attributes the economic motivation of the local governments to rent and regards land finance as the way the local governments use rent for strategic investment,and attempts to further develop this view within a Marxist framework.To this end,we trace back to Marxist rent theory and gives a preliminary discussion on the relationship between the productive use of rent and the economic role of the state.We then apply David Harvey’ s theory of institution-monopoly rent to the analysis of investment in the built environment of China’ s local governments.The basic conclusion of this article is that,in the strategic investment with land finance as the core,the local governments of China have acted as a productive distributor and user of rent,and as a result they have wedged their way into the process of relative surplus value production previously limited to competition between enterprises only.Hence a dual structure of relative surplus value production peculiar to the Chinese economy which has created a rare high investment rate in the world for a long time and promoted the sustained and rapid growth of the Chinese economy.