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发表于 2006-7-15 10:47:01
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5. SOME DIFFERENT THEORETICAL STORIES ON
GROWTH, IN GENERAL, AND THE POST-WAR
PERIOD, IN PARTICULAR
It is revealing to compare the bare bones of the interpretative stories that
‘evolutionists’ and ‘regulationists’ would be inclined to put forward about the
basics of the growth process were they forced to summarize them in a few
sentences.
Most likely, the story provided within an evolutionary perspective would
start with a multitude of firms searching for more efficient techniques of
production and better performing products, and competing in the markets for
products and finance. Differential success in search, together with different
behavioural rules and strategies (concerning, for example, pricing, investment
and so on), would then determine their differential revealed performances
(in terms, for example, of their profitability, market shares or survival probabilities)
and hence their ability to grow in the next ‘period’. Aggregate
growth, in this view, is essentially driven by technological advances. Similarly,
the eye of the analyst is naturally led to look for the origins, nature and
accessibility of technological opportunities; the ease with which firms can
imitate each other (that is, appropriability conditions); the ways firms are
able to store and augment their knowledge (that is, the relationships between
organizational routines and competences); and finally, the mechanisms and
speed of market selection.
As already emphasized, such an evolutionary story is comfortable with
complementary institutional factors. Most straightforwardly, for example, it
is consistent with (and indeed demands) an institutionally grounded explanation
of the mechanisms of generation of ‘opportunities’ to be tapped by
private agents; of the legal framework contributing to shape appropriability
conditions; of the origins of particular sets of corporate routines; of the
nature of market interactions; of the ways wages react to the changes in the
demand for labour induced by technical change and growth; and so on.
However, compare this story with the much more directly institution-based
story within a regulation perspective. In the latter, plausibly, the starting point
would be an analysis of the factors which render a particular regime of
accumulation viable (note incidentally that while it was possible to tell a
caricature of an evolutionary story of capitalist growth in general, here one
needs history-contingent specifications from the start). One part of the story
would concern the institutions governing wage formation, the labour process
and income distribution – determining labour productivity and the surplus
available for investment. Another part of the story would focus on the mechanisms
of generation of aggregate demand (including the ways income
distribution and social institutions affect the composition and dynamics of
consumption baskets). Yes another part would address the ways the state
intervenes in the economy (for example, is it a ‘Keynesian’/welfare state or is
it a laissez-faire one. Moreover, one would look at the ways products and
financial markets are organized. In a nutshell, the answer to the question of
‘what drives growth’ is found in the consistency conditions among those
major pieces of institutional organization of the socio-economic fabric. Hence,
consistent matching fosters sustained growth, while mismatching engenders
instability, crises and macroeconomic depression.
Having focused, in primis, on the institutional features of the system, the
approach in manners somewhat symmetrically opposite to the ‘evolutionary’
interpretation is complementary to detailed specifications of the patterns
of technological change. For example, it is easily acknowledged that technological
innovation is a major determinant of the division of labour and
work organization; of the importance of economics of scale (and thus of the
aggregate relationships between productivity growth and income growth);
of demand patterns; of international competitiveness; and so on. However,
it is fair to say that what appears as the major driver of growth in the
evolutionary account, here (in the regulation approach) it tends to feature
more in the background among the necessary or constraining conditions for
growth, while the opposite applies to the thread of country-specific and
period-specific institutions. |
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