自生能力、经济转型与现代经济学的反思和扩展.doc

Forthcoming in Journal of Economic Policy Reform The Washington Consensus Revisited A New Structural Economics Perspective Justin Yifu Lin Abstract The Washington Consensus reform resulted in economic collapse and stagnation in many transition economies and “lost decades” in other developing countries in 1980s and 1990s. The paper provides a new structural economics perspective of such failures. The Washington Consensus reform failed to recognize that many firms in a transition economy were not viable in an open, competitive market because those industries went against the comparative advantages determined by the economy’s endowment structure. Their survival relied on the government’s protections and subsidies through various interventions and distortions. The Washington Consensus advised the government to focus their reforms on issues related to property rights, corporate governance, government interventions and other issues that may obstruct a firm’s normal management. Without resolving the firms’ viability problem, such reforms led to the firms’ collapse and an unintended decline and stagnation of the economy in the transition process. This paper suggests that the viability assumption in neoclassical economics be relaxed when analyzing development and transition issues in socialist, transition and developing economies. JEL Classification: L5, O1, P5  Introduction Since the late 1970s, China and other socialist countries began the transition from a planned economy to a market economy in order to improve their economic performance. Figure 1 shows that such a transition brought about rapid economic growth in China and Vietnam from the very beginning. The transitions that began in the early 1990s in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries (FSUEE hereafter), however, led to dramatic declines in their economies and deterioration in most aspects of social development (World Bank, 2002; Dell’Anno and Villa, 2013). A survey conducted in 2006 by the Europea