政府、社会信任与经济增长

Government,Social Trust and Economic Growth

正式和非正式规则是维持经济社会信任和商业合作的两种重要制度安排,但这两种规则往往内生于一国的经济发展水平和国家战略。本文研究表明,在一国经济发展过程中,不断降低的利率扩大了资本借贷的规模,使得非正式规则不断逼近其“信任半径”~((1))的边界,非正式规则逐步让位于正式规则。更为重要的是,在一国经济发展的早期,非正式规则对经济的增长做出了重要贡献,并且这种贡献与一国硬件基础设施存量、法制的效率、信息不完备的程度成反比。我们还发现一国政府在经济发展早期的基础设施投资时,会内生地优先投资于硬件基础设施而不是软件基础设施,直至经济发展的后期,当市场规模和范围的扩大制约了非正式规则的扩张,软件基础设施投资才是一国政府基础设施投资的重点。跨国的微观和宏观数据在经验层面证实了本文的主要结论。

Since the end of the 1970s,China’s economic transformation and development has seen a growth miracle.Many studies have shown that institutional quality has an important impact on a country’s long-term macroeconomic activities and micro arrangements,but a large amount of evidence shows that China’s development are achieved in the condition of poor formal economic institutions(property protection and contract enforcement).The execution of economic contracts does not depend entirely on the formal system,and informal institution also plays a very important role.The economic transformation of many developing countries,including China,exhibits two unique institutional characteristics,namely,biased infrastructure investment and informal economic governance.Firstly,data show that many developing countries will give priority to investing in hardware infrastructure such as roads and railways,but lag behind in software infrastructure such as legislation,judiciary,and law enforcement.Secondly,traditional Chinese society is a typical relational society,and disputes are usually resolved through networking which will broke up with resort to law.Formal and informal rules are two important institutional arrangements for maintaining economic and social trust and commercial cooperation,but these two contractual institutional arrangements are often endogenous to a country’s economic development level and national strategy.The core task of this paper is to explore how formal and informal rules are endogenous with the participation of the government,and how they interact over a long period of time to form a country’s stable contract enforcement structure and shape a country’s long-term economic growth trajectory.We study the dynamic game process between the government and the private sector by constructing an overlapping generations(OLG)model which contains the government,and numerically simulate the dynamic change path of the private sector’s decision-making when the government’s investment behavior is exogenous and endogenous,the optimal investment path of the government at different stages of development and the optimal investment path of the heterogeneous government.Our research shows that although the formal rules are suitable for large-scale and long-distance intertemporal market transactions,there is a relatively large fixed start-up cost.The informal rules can reduce transaction costs,but the market size and market capacity are limited.In the process of a country’s economic development,the ever-decreasing interest rates have expanded the scale of capital loan,causing the informal rules to approach the boundary of its“trust radius”continuously,and the formal rules to gradually replace the informal rules.Nevertheless,we find that the informal rules have played an important role in a country’s early stage of economic development,and this contribution is inversely proportional to the stock of a country’s hardware infrastructure,efficiency of the legal system,and degree of incomplete information.This paper also discusses that the government will endogenously give priority to hardware infrastructure rather than software infrastructure in the early stages of economic development.While,the expansion of market size and scope will restrict the effectiveness of informal rules in the later stage of economic development,then the government will focus on software infrastructure investment.In addition,we use the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data to empirically verify the influencing factors of relationship-based financing of heterogeneous producers when government’s investment behavior is exogenous.And further we use the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Monitor data to empirically verify the optimal software and hardware infrastructure investment path of the government and the impact of heterogeneous governments.In order to solve the endogeneity problem,appropriate instrumental variables are selected and all relevant tests are passed.Both cross-country micro and macro data confirm our main findings robustly with all main explanatory variables,regression sample and regression method replaced.Our research shows that formal and informal institutions are endogenous to a country’s economic development stages,echoing Douglass North’s opinion that institutions are the result,not the cause,of development.Our research will help to understand the important roles of governments and their own cultures in the process of finding their own development paths in the context of different history and cultures.Our research has a strong policy implication,which shows that one country’s institutional development should adapt to local conditions and the current conditions.When formulating specific monetary and fiscal policies and industrial policies,informal institutions need to be properly considered and used in a specific development stages.The further expansion of the analytical framework in this paper will also serve as a reference for the integration of new institutional economics and economic growth theories.