利益冲突与制度扭曲——论政府在经济发展和转型中的作用

本文在McGuire和Olson(1996)的基础上进一步讨论了政府在经济活动中的地位和作用.我们发现,即使是具有共容利益的政府,其与社会之间依然存在着利益冲突.因此,政府的存在总会造成一定的制度扭曲,使经济处于非最优效率状态.本文还研究了政府与社会之间的利益冲突在转型经济中的表现.研究表明,政府与社会之间的利益冲突会随着经济体制的改进而得到强化,从而使新制度受到更大的扭曲.另外,政府与社会之间的利益冲突会对经济体制的优化产生不同的影响,但最终都会妨碍制度变迁达至最优状态.本文的研究实际上指出了政治体制改革对经济发展和转型的重要意义.我们也指出,在转型经济中,政治体制改革的时机选择不当可能会导致结果事与愿违     

中国行政改革与经济发展之间的相互影响

改革开放初期,行政改革所带来的制度变迁有力地促进了中国经济的增长,但随着中国经济的增长,行政改革却举步维艰。近年来在行政改革滞后的情况下中国经济依然保持了高速的增长,经济增长与行政改革的滞后形成了强烈的落差。这种落差使得中国的行政改革滞后与经济增长之间形成了一种畸形的关系。行政改革滞后所带来的各种社会问题需要维持高速的经济增长来解决,而经济的增长则不断强化现有的制度安排,使得行政改革的阻力增大。打破行政改革滞后与经济增长之间的依赖关系迫切需要新的制度创新。     

亚洲棋局与中国的应对策略

近些年来亚洲经济、政治和军事格局发生了重大的变化,各方力量在合作和冲突中博奕,出现了许多不确定因素。主要国家实力的此消彼长,美国力量的重返亚洲,亚洲各方同美国的角力,经济模式的制约,历史问题的纠葛等,应成为观察亚洲问题需要考量的重要方面。面对亚洲格局变化的挑战,中国有必要反思自己的外交策略,有所为有所不为,同时着力于发展与改革,把自己的事情办好。     

试论政府在经济转型和改革过程中的作用——中、俄、印三国之比较分析

经济改革和转型过程中,政府应该发挥怎样的作用,是学界和决策层多年来一直特别关注的问题。与改革或转型的策略及路径相联系,有关政府职能的讨论可以大致分为以下三类观点:亲善市场论、国家推动发展论和市场增进论。中国、俄罗斯和印度三个国家在改革的初始条件、改革方式及改革进程上既有相似之处,又有完全不同的地方,但这三国都经历了并且仍在继续着经济体制改革和转型,而且三国的经济改革和转型到目前为止都取得了一定成就,三国的经济发展前景也为世界所看好。本文对亲善市场论、国家推动发展论和市场增进论进行了分析比较,考察了中国、俄罗斯及印度改革过程中政府作用的得失,论证了政府在经济改革和发展进程中具有异乎寻常的关键性作用,它是改革和发展的核心内容之一,决定了改革和发展能否顺利地、“帕累托改进式”地向前进行。     

Reforming Budgetary Institutions in Latin America: The Case for a National Fiscal Council

Latin America's economies have made tremendous improvements in recent years. Following the lost decade of the 1980s, economic growth has resumed. But the fruits of this progress remain to be consolidated. The political consensus supporting reform is fragile, and the economies of the region are still susceptible to destabilizing shocks, as recent events have underscored. Even well-devised economic policy strategies can be thrown off course by disturbances. This article proposes an institutional reform—a National Fiscal Council—designed to allow Latin American countries to break out of this vicious circle.     

Political instability and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Further evidence

After more than three decades of independence, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have not yet developed stable political systems. Since the 1960s, when African countries began to achieve independence, many of them have encountered significant levels of institutional instability. In recent years, political violence has emerged as the most common method of governmental change. In this study, the effects of political violence on economic and human development in Sub-Saharan Africa are examined. It is seen that political instability is a significant constraint to the improvement of the human condition in the region.     

Neo-liberal Korea and Still Developmentalist Japan: Myth or Reality?1

Abstract

In the “varieties of capitalism” debate, scholars have paid considerable attention to the question of whether Korea and Japan have left behind their interventionist political economy for neo-liberal reform. In this paper, we re-examine the scholarly consensus that Korea has become a neo-liberal state, while Japan has not changed much. On the basis of our comparison of the extent of the two countries’ neo-liberal reforms using the “business systems framework” developed by Witt, we demonstrate that neo-liberal reforms observed in Korea and Japan are not substantially different enough to warrant the view that the two countries have taken divergent paths of institutional development. With this finding, we call for further empirical study, including the development and use of more qualitative data. We suggest that the future direction research should take on this issue in order to make theoretical contributions to the existing literature on institutional change and continuity in “non-liberal” capitalist countries. We do this by offering some methods in which future researchers could identify necessary and sufficient causes of Korea's and Japan's neo-liberal (or non-neo-liberal) shift.     

China’s reform and opening process: a new model of political economy?

The reform and opening process has led to an impressive economic development which saw China becoming the second-largest economy in the world. This development resulted in an ongoing discussion about the nature of the Chinese state and reinvigorated the discussion of the role the state plays in national development. Addressing the challenges of how to interpret the contemporary Chinese state, it will be argued that a particular institutional setting has a strong impact on future developments, and China’s reform process provides an insightful example in this regard. Indeed, we should remember that in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution the Communist Party of China faced both a fundamental political crisis and an economic crisis of underperformance. In order to develop a deeper insight into the political-economic changes, we can observe during the reform process, a comprehensive analysis is required, one which focuses on the changes in China’s political-economic regime.     

The economic development approach to legal reform for rural women: A methodological alternative

Legislative efforts to promote rural women's economic productivity have focused on strategies for improving access to and control over agricultural resources. Women make up 50 per cent of the world's farmers, but in many developing countries they are unable to hold or manage productive resources in their own name. Most legal proposals recommend family law reform as the entry point for change. This article argues for a broader approach. All the laws that affect rural economic development should be evaluated and linked in ways that promote rural women's integration into the economic mainstream. In agriculture the‐most important legislation is natural resource management, local government development and agricultural development and agricultural investment laws, including research, intellectual property protection, cooperatives, banking and marketing. Each law should be assessed from the perspective of four generic development attributes: how it contributes to women's representation in policymaking; what economic benefits it provides; whether it facilitates the evolution of organisational structures to help women attract capital; and whether there are clear systems for enforcing rights and therefore minimising risk. Next, the process is reversed to determine how the laws collectively support each of the four areas. This methodology allows the researcher to tease out and rearrange essential elements of a comprehensive enabling environment that provide a sufficient level of institutional support in all four areas across the entire spectrum of agricultural development.     

INSTITUTIONS,BANKING DEVELOPMENT,AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Does the institutional environment affect the causal relationship between banking development and economic growth? In the theoretical section of this paper, we develop an endogenous growth model where the institutional environment is captured through two indicators: judicial system efficiency and easiness of informal trade. We show that an improvement in the institutional environment has two effects. First, it intensifies the causality direction from banking to economic growth through a reduction in defaulting loans. Second, it reduces the interest rate spread. In the empirical section of the paper, we find bidirectional causality when analyzing 22 Middle Eastern and North African countries over the period 1984–2004. The first causality, which runs from banking development to economic growth, is more intense in countries with more developed institutional environment. The second causality runs from economic growth to banking and indicates that a more developed economy has a more developed banking system.     

社会主义市场经济要求政府体制改革什么

“十一五”规划强调行政管理体制改革要以继续推进“政企分开,政经分开,政事分开”为主要内容。政府兼有作为“政治实体”和“经济实体”两重身份和两种职能,乃是“政企不分”、“政经不分”的体制根源。这种体制是建国初期从前苏联学来的,长期成为计划经济的源头,现在成为建立社会市场经济的严重障碍。为此,必须让政府从两重身份和两重职能中脱身,仅只具有“政治实体”身份和“公共服务”职能,统辖提供公共产品和公共服务的国企;另在政府之外设置一个作为经济实体的国家载体(如“人大”),统辖经营性竞争性国企。首先分清和分开两类职能不同的国企,即财政账户项目类国企和资本账户项目类国企,应该退出经营性竞争性行业和领域的是政府而不是国企。再循此理顺中央与地方的关系,应是产权明晰,分级所有,可相互参股或控股。政府行政管理体制改革最需要体制创新。     

新制度经济学视角下的户籍制度改革探讨

我国现行户籍制度的弊端主要表现为非公正性、制约经济发展和有损人口统计的职能。本文基于新制度经济学制度变迁的理论,分析户籍制度改革的政治和经济基础,提出了我国户籍制度改革的基本框架,主要为:户籍制度回归本位,建立相关福利制度的对接机制,坚持渐进式和激进式相结合的原则,采取老人老办法,新人新办法的思路以及坚持统筹城乡经济社会发展等。     

A view from behavioral political economy on China's institutional change

A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China's market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. According to prospect theory, how rulers frame their decisions — in the prospects of gains or losses, influences how much risk they will take. China's market reform has been largely framed in the prospects of economic gains, for which the continuously growing private sector is the driving force. China's central government adopts a growth-oriented incremental reform that coincides with the prediction of prospect theory.     

Political and Economic Inequities and the Shaping of Institutions and Redistribution

This article studies the joint effect of political and economic inequalities on redistributive taxation and institutional quality. The theoretical model suggests that income inequality, coupled with political bias in favor of the rich, decreases redistribution and lowers institutional quality. The effect of the former is to increase productive investment, and the effect of the latter is to decrease it—with resulting ambiguous implications for economic growth. Testing these predictions empirically in a panel of countries, we find that inequality has a negative effect on both institutional quality and redistribution.     

Liberalizing Autocracies in the Gulf Region? Reform Strategies in the Face of a Cultural-Economic Syndrome

From an international comparative perspective, the stability of autocratic regimes in the countries of the Gulf region is striking. This paper presents historical–cultural as well as economic explanations and proposes that the interaction of both factors constitutes a cultural-economic syndrome accounting for the persistence of authoritarianism. Macro-quantitative analyses demonstrate the significant influence of this syndrome, which operates through a mechanism of mutual reinforcement and substitution. Departing from this diagnosis, potential remedies are discussed: political and economic reform measures pursued in the 1990s are explored, and the Gulf monarchies are classified according to four ideal-typical combinations of reform strategies.     

Taxation and tax reform in LDCs: Lessons for South Africa

Taxation in South Africa will increasingly have to focus on political and economic developmental demands. Two important lessons from the experience of developing countries with taxation and tax reform are that the tax system should aim at not taxing the poor (rather than trying to level down the income of the rich) and that tax policy has a special role to play in generating revenue for development, a role which it should endeavour fill in a neutral way. With these lessons in mind taxation and tax reform are analysed in South Africa. It is concluded that the tax system is relatively efficient but that there has been retrogression in attaining equity objectives.     

Innovation or Rent-seeking： The Entrepreneurial Behavior during China＇s Economic Transformation

Although achieving impressive economic growth during the economic reform period, China has been plagued by rampant corruption and a widening income gap. How can the coexistence of these two phenomena be explained？ In this paper, we argue that before 1994, the coexistence was induced by a series of expediential institutional arrangements to stimulate entrepreneurial activities and after 1994, it was entrenched because of the slow progress in the overall reform toward becoming a market economy and because of inappropriate government actions and the lack of government action in institutional building. To solve these problems, economic and political reforms need to be accelerated to improve market institutions and to establish the rule of law.     

Japan's FDI drivers in a time of financial uncertainty. New evidence based on Bayesian Model Averaging

In this paper we analyse the determinants of Japanese outward FDI stock for the period 1996–2017. This period is especially relevant as it covers a process of increasing economic globalization and two financial crises. To this aim, we consider a large set of candidate variables based on the theory as well as on previous empirical analysis. Our sample includes a total of 27 host countries. We select the covariates using a data-driven methodology, the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) analysis. Moreover, we also analyse whether these determinants change depending on the degree of development (emerging vs developed) or the geographical areas (EU vs East Asia) of the countries considered. We find that Japan's FDI can be explained by a wide variety of variables, that include not only the typical gravitational ones but also institutional and macroeconomic variables, including those that measure financial development. Moreover, Japanese FDI can be explained by both horizontal and vertical FDI motives in the groups of countries analysed. However, in developed, and more precisely, EU countries, horizontal FDI strategies are predominant, whereas for East Asian and emerging countries, there is more evidence in favour of vertical FDI.     

Eco-innovation for environmental sustainability: concepts, progress and policies

There is increasing scientific evidence that natural systems are now at a level of stress globally that could have profound negative effects on human societies worldwide. In order to avoid these effects, one, or a number of technological transitions will need to take place through transforming processes of eco-innovation, which have complex political, institutional and cultural, in addition to technological and economic, dimensions. Measurement systems need to be devised that can assess to what extent eco-innovation is taking place. Environmental and eco-innovation have already led in a number of European countries to the establishment of substantial eco-industries, but, because of the general absence of environmental considerations in markets, these industries are very largely the result of environmental public policies, the nature and effectiveness of which have now been assessed through a number of reviews and case studies. The paper concludes that such policies will need to become much more stringent if eco-innovation is to drive an adequately far-reaching technological transition to resolve pressing environmental challenges. Crucial in the political economy of this change will be that eco-industries, supported by public opinion, are able to counter the resistance of established industries which will lose out from the transition, in a reformed global context where international treaties and co-operation prevent the relocation of environmentally destructive industries and encourage their transformation.     

中国—东盟自由贸易区的体育产业策略研究

本文从分析东盟各国之间的经济与体育产业的发展水平存在差异出发,研究导致中国—东盟体育产业落后的外在影响因素以及制约东盟国家体育发展的内在因素,提出共同开发体育产业市场、加强运动训练的交流与合作、实施品牌战略培育体育用品市场、通过开发民族传统体育获得国际体育话语权等中国东盟经济圈体育产业合作与发展的策略。