创新、内生增长与气候变化:2018年度诺贝尔经济科学奖得主的贡献简评

Innovation, Endogenous Growth and Climate Change: Comments on Works of the 2018 Nobel Prize Winners in Economic Sciences

2018年度的诺贝尔经济科学奖颁给了著名美国经济学家William D. Nordhaus和Paul M. Romer教授,以表彰其在技术创新、气候变化和内生经济增长领域的卓越贡献。稀缺性是经济学的核心属性,而知识和创新是我们应对自然资源稀缺性制约的有效手段,两位诺奖获得者通过构建市场经济与自然资源和知识的交互作用模型,有力拓展了经济分析的范畴。Nordhaus的研究主要集中在气候变化经济学领域,他提出了分析全球变暖问题的经济学方法,将新古典经济理论与大气物理、化学等方法相结合,开创性地建立了动态集成的气候经济模型(DICE),对社会碳成本(SCC)管理以及基于市场机制的气候变化解决方案进行了深入研究。Romer的主要贡献是创新性地提出了四要素增长理论(自然资本、劳动、人力资本和知识创新),建立了内生经济增长模型,将知识作为资本投入考虑到经济和技术体系中,模拟了经济决策和市场条件决定新技术创造的过程。Romer的理论重新燃起了经济学界对内生增长的浓厚兴趣,实践层面也引导产生了大量的相关法规和政策。本文旨在对两位教授在技术创新、气候变化和内生经济增长领域的主要研究成果进行梳理和总结,简评相关理论的应用进展及实践贡献,继而揭示对未来国内外相关研究和政策设计的指导性意义。

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Professors William D. Nordhaus and Paul M. Romer for their outstanding contributions to climate change, technological innovation and endogenouseconomic growth research. Natural scarcity is one of core properties of economics, while knowledge and innovation are effective ways to break the bottleneck of resource scarcity. Two Nobel Prize winners in 2018 made great contributions to these areas by establishing interactional model of market economy, knowledge and natural resources. To be specific, the emphasis of Professor Nordhaus＇ s research has long been placed on climate change economics. He was the first to lay down the economic analysis framework on climate change, and creatively built a dynamic integrated climate economic model（DICE）, which has been broadly employed to manage social cost of carbon（SCC） and provide market-oriented strategies for tackling climate change. Professor Romer proposed the famous four-factor growth theory（i.e., physical capital, labor, human capital and knowledge）, and developed an endogenous economic growth model by incorporating knowledge stock into economic production. His research heavily re-spurs the academic interests in economic growth, and in practice, promotes the making of plenty of regulations and policies associated with economic development. This work dedicates to reveal the contributions of Professors Nordhaus and Romer＇s works, summarizes the state-of-the-art lessons abstracted from their theories and applications, and indicates possible directions for future research and policy-making on knowledge creation, technological change and economic growth.