市场社会主义者

如同 “社会主义市场者”，“市场社会主义者”也是社会主义者,因为他们始终坚持“公有制”和“按劳分配”这“社会主义”仅存的两大信条。然而， 他们的著作往往给人这样一种印象，即：坚持市场比坚持“社会主义”更为重要。市场社会主义者不反对从根本上改革公有制，也不反对对“按劳分配”的原则进行再定义，只要这些改变是必要的，并且是有利于推动社会经济发展的。
市场社会主义者接受来自私有化拥护者对国有企业的批评，同时，在对产权问题关注方面，他们付出的精力并不比私有化拥护者少。然而，市场社会主义者并不赞同后者所坚信不疑的一点------没有私有制的主导，竞争性市场无法正常运行。 的确，私有化拥护者对私有制优越性的信念很大程度上是无事实根据的。 原因如下：
1，非国有企业不应该理所当然的认为是完全私有的。事实上，中国的非国有企业主要是由乡镇企业组成的。
2，目前为止， 中国还没有实证研究比较国有企业和私营企业的表现的差别。有评论认为在中国私有制比公有制更优越，但是这缺乏强有力的依据。
3，非国有企业更快的产出年增长率和劳动生产率并不表明非国有企业比国有企业具备更高的劳动生产率水平。低起点可能是其高速增长的原因。格里 。杰佛森指出：“ 即使在劳动生产率方面，非国有企业已经超越了国有企业，这也不能理所当然地仅仅归因于所有制的差别。
4，私有制在竞争性环境中有利于诱导创新，降低成本，而诸如此类的原由与竞争对效率的影响大于所有制这一推测并不冲突。事实上， 大量国外研究表明，国有企业易受竞争条件（如类似于面对私有企业对手的处境）的控制， 在这种环境中， 他们的表现不一定是劣势的(Caves and Christensen 1980, Vernon and Aharoni 1981, Vernon 1987)。换句话说，公有制并不不一定比私有制差。
市场社会主义者公开表示， 竞争而非所有制本身才是效率提高的关键因素（Zhou 1993）。所以在上世纪九十年代，中国的任务是双重的。一方面， 必须建立一个更加具有竞争性的环境来给国有企业制造更多的外在压力。另一方面，我们必须努力把非国有企业的竞争活力注入到国有企业当中。
营造一个竞争环境的关键是非国有企业强有力的发展。市场社会主义者倡导发展非国有企业，不是因为他们相信非国有企业可以取代国有企业成为社会经济的主导力量，而是因为他们认为来自非国有企业的压力有助于推动国有企业投入到市场竞争中。没有外界的压力，国有企业不可能改变其传统的经营模式。
非国有企业的经济活动应该限制在一定的范围吗？不需要，这是市场社会主义者的回答。 在他们看来，这些活动不仅是被允许的，而且应该多鼓励非国有企业在各个领域与国有企业展开竞争。应不应该设置一个限度来保证非国有企业在市场中的份额不超过国有企业？对于这个问题，市场社会主义者再次给了一个否定的回答。就就业人数和产出总额方面，早在1991年，非国有企业已经超过了国有企业，并且，在1992年，其工业产出的总额也超过了非国有企业（Gong 1993）。如果数量上设置上限，那么非国有企业就没有足够的空间成长，发展。
市场社会主义者相信国有企业必须在中国的“社会主义市场经济”中起主导作用， 但是他们拒绝接受这样的观点，即“主导作用”必须理解成为产出数量的优势。相反，他们提出“主导作用”是一个质量方面的概念。“国有企业的优越性和带头作用不是体现在它在社会经济总产出的比例（比如，50%），而是其生命力，竞争力，它影响国家参股企业决策的能力，和它对一些具有战略意义工业的控制力。

然而，外在压力对国有企业实现“利润最大化”来说是必要而非充分条件。为了提高国有企业的竞争力，中国政府在过去的十年连续不断地试图通过改革国有企业的激励机制，促使它们追求“利润最大化”。.在企业改革的头几年里，人们普遍认为国有企业的低效率主要是因为经理没有足够大的决策权以及工人没有相应的物质激励。早期改革于是着重于修改现有改革方案，允许企业保留更多的资金，扩大企业的自主经营小。另一方面权。但是，这些改革的成效现在已经消失。一方面，经理一直在抱怨企业保留的资金太少，他们的决策权力还是太，更多资金的保留和企业自主权的扩大并没有相应的提高企业的生产能力（Aram and Wang 1991）。国有企业改革的局面看起来似乎已经陷入困境，如果经理没有足够的判断力，其公司在市场中就不能实现“利润最大化”；如果他有充分的分辨力，他才有可能利用其判断力来实现“利润最大化”目标而不是尽可能的获取利润。
在资金代理关系中，人们希望通过只给予代理人其创造全部价值的一小部分，诱导代理人释放其工作热情。为什么这不会发生在中国企业改革过程中呢？
有三方面的原因：
第一，资金分配方案是由当地政府部门和企业经理人通过特别的计划事先协商决定的。既然在他们的控制范围内，没有任何一方是企业的剩余索取人，他们就很有可能共谋增加企业积累资金，而不管公司生产能力的水平。
第二，尽管政府规定了怎样将留有的资金划分为积累资金，公积金和待分配利润，但是由于信息不对称问题，真正的分配决定权掌握在公司经理人手里。因为经理人和工人都不是企业的剩余索取人，他们很可能串通好尽可能地多花工人的赔偿金（Lee 1993）。
第三，积累资金的低水平并没有使经理人和工人感到忧虑，因为即使是最最糟糕的情况出现了。如公司出现巨大亏损。他们很清楚：政府会为他们交“保释金”摆脱困境的。

本文作者：Shaogang Wang.为美国耶鲁大学生政治学系助教，来源于《世界管理》,1994,vol.157


The compatibility of Public Ownership and the Market Economy:

Market Socialists
Like "socialist marketeers," "market socialists" are socialists in the sense that they still stick to public ownership and "distribution according to work," the remaining two pillars of "socialism." However, their writings often give one an impression that they put "market" before "socialism." They have no objection to fundamentally remoulding public ownership and to redefining the principle of "distribution according to work," as long as such changes are necessary for making the economy more efficient.
Market socialists accept the criticisms of state enterprises made by privatization advocates, and they also pay a great deal of attention to the issue of property rights just as privatization advocates do. But they don‘t share the latter‘s conviction that competitive markets cannot operate properly in the absence of the domination of private ownership. Indeed, privatization advocates‘ faith in the superiority of private ownership is probably ill-founded for a number of reasons.
1. The non-state sector should not been mistakenly represented as predominantly privately owned. In fact, China’s non-state sector is made up mainly by urban and rural collective enterprises.
2. So far there has no empirical study comparing the performance differences between the state-owned enterprise and the private-owned enterprise in China. The assertion that private ownership is superior to public ownership in China needs solid evidence to back up.
3. The non-state sector’s faster annual growth rate of output and productivity doesn’t mean that the non-state sector has attained higher levels of productivity than the state sector. Their low starting point might be an explanation of their high growth rate. Even if the non-state sector had surpassed the state sector in productivity, this, as Gary Jefferson points out, cannot be automatically attributed to pure ownership differences (Jefferson 1993).
4. The evidence that private ownership in a competitive environment is sufficient to induce innovation, cost minimization, and the like does not contradict the conjecture that competition may be a more important influence on efficiency than ownership. In fact, a number of studies done outside of China have shown that in situations in which publicly-owned firms were subject to competitive conditions similar to those facing private sector counterparts, their performance was not necessarily inferior (Caves and Christensen 1980, Vernon and Aharoni 1981, Vernon 1987). In other words, public ownership is not inherently less efficient than private ownership.
Market socialists apparently believe that competition rather than ownership per se is the key to efficiency (Zhou 1993). Thus, China‘s task in the 1990s is two-fold. On the one hand, a more competitive environment should be created to build growing external pressures on state-owned enterprises. On the other hand, efforts should be made to inject the competitive vigor that we have observed in non-state enterprises into state-owned enterprises.
The key to creating a competitive environment is to forcefully develop the non-state sector of the economy. Market socialists advocate the development of the non-state sector, not because they are convinced that sector should replace the state sector to become the leading force of the economy in the future, but because they hold that pressures from the non-state sector are vital for pushing state-owned enterprises to throw themselves into market competition. Without pressures from outside, state-owned enterprises may never change their habitual behaviors.
Should not-state enterprises‘ economic activities be confined within a certain boundary? No, market socialists answered. In their opinion, such activities should be allowed and encouraged to compete with state-owned enterprises in all areas. Should a limitation be set so that the share of the non-state sector in the economy would not surpass that of the state sector? To this question, again, market socialists give a negative answer. In terms of employment and gross output, the non-state sector already exceeded the state sector 1991, and its share of industrial output topped the state sector in 1992 (Gong 1993). If a quantitative upper limit were to be set, there would not be much more space for the non-state sector to grow. Market socialists believe that the state sector should play a leading role in China’s "socialist market economy," but they refuse to accept the proposition that the "leading role" should be understood in terms of quantitative superiority.
Instead, they suggest that the "leading role" is a qualitative concept. "The superiority and guiding role of the state sector do not depend on its proportion of total output(say, over 50 percent) in the economy, but on its vitality and competitiveness, on its ability to influence the decision-making of economic entities in which the state holds some of the shares, and on its control over a few strategically important industries" (Liu 1993).
External pressures, however, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for making state-owned enterprises "profit maximizers." To improve the performance of state-owned enterprises, Chinese authorities have in the last decade continuously tried to change their incentive payoffs so that they would be willing to act as "profit maximizers." In the early years of enterprise reform, it was thought that the inefficiency of state-owned enterprises was due to insufficient delegation of decision-making power to managers and inadequate material incentives for workers. Early reforms thus concentrated on devising schemes that allowed enterprises to retain more profits and expanded enterprises‘ operational autonomy. The results of those reforms, however, have been disappointing. On the one hand, managers are still complaining that the amounts of retained profits are too small and their decision-making powers too limited. On the other hand, the retention of more profits and the expansion of enterprise autonomy have not brought about corresponding increases in productive effort (Aram and Wang 1991). There seems to be a dilemma: if a manager doesn‘t have sufficient discretion, her firm cannot act as a "profit maximizer" in markets; if she is given considerable discretion, she may use the discretion to pursue goals other than profit maximization.
In principal-agent relationships, one expects that by promising the agent a fraction of the full value of his performance, the agent would be induced to deliver productive effort. Why hasn‘t this occurred in China‘s enterprise reform? There are three reasons. First, the partition of profits is determined by ad hoc bargaining between local state agencies and enterprise managers. Since none of them are residual claimants of the state properties under their control, they are likely to collude to increase enterprises‘ profit retention regardless of the level of productive efforts. Second, although the government has regulations on how to divide retained profits into accumulation funds, collective welfare funds, and bonus funds, due to information asymmetry, the real control over the division is in the hands of enterprise managers. Because neither they nor the workers are residual claimants, they are likely to collude to spent as much as they can on worker compensation (Lee 1993). Third, the low level of accumulation funds doesn‘t worry managers and workers. If worst comes to worst---their enterprises suffer heavy losses, they know that the government would bail them out.


This journal article by Shaoguang Wang, a assistant professor of Department of Political Science Yale University. It’s from 《World Affairs》 Vol. 157, 1994