Trial Time
Recently, the Sino -US trade war has gradually upgraded, which has set off a wave of waves in the market, bringing huge uncertainty to the global economy.At this time, Re -Reading the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences Thomas Middot; Thomas Schelling's works and Micromotives and Macrobehavior could not help but feel a lot.
People usually assume that every person's every move is intentional, and they are expressing preferences or pursuing their goals.Starting from the infant period that will only make crying, each of us's behavior has become the object of others to speculate on our motivation without exception.However, the assumptions of intentional behavior are sometimes wrong.
Xue Ling pointed out in the book: We may think of what other people's actions are pursuing what goals or solutions to solve.Driven by this idea, we may forget that people sometimes go astray, and they will not know what their goals are, and even inadvertently suffer from subconsciousness.Or pain.When others reach the goal we think he wants to pursue, we may exaggerate the actual benefits he has gained from it.
It is wrong to speculate that the opponent's motivation is exaggerated to exaggerate the benefits of the other party, and such things often happen in international relations.China's industrial policy is such a case.
The leaders of China's market -oriented reform have proposed the reform ideas of the state that regulate the market and guide enterprises in the market more than 30 years ago. The industrial policy was considered to be the main tool for replacing national plans and regulating the market at the time.This is actually the world's approach to the development direction of industrial development and the upgrading of the industrial structure by formulating industrial policies.
The problem was that at that time, the scale of China's economy was relatively small, and the trade connection with other countries was not so close. The state regulated the Chinese market and guided Chinese enterprises.However, when China has become the world's second largest economy and the largest exporter, China's industrial policy regulates the global market and has a huge impact on companies in other countries.As a result, China's industrial policy has aroused close attention from the international community.
The national regulating market often has too much adjustment.In the micro -motivation and macro behavior, Xue Ling explained the situation with the thermostat of the old -fashioned home heating system.When the outdoor temperature drops sharply, the indoor temperature also decreases.Although the thermostat has begun to start heating, the water in the old -fashioned boiler is not hot enough, and it takes a period of time to send the heating.Some people have no patience at this time to adjust the set temperature of the thermostat to a high place.After a period of time, the boiler began to heat and increase the indoor temperature to the set level.At this time, everyone is uncomfortable, and they will adjust the set temperature of the thermostat to the low point.
This excessive adjustment behavior is constantly repeated because the adjustment temperature of the old -fashioned thermostat has been lagging behind.Xue Ling believes that over -tunes at the policy level often appear.After the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in 1957, the United States felt that it was behind the space competition, so he had a strong sense of urgency.When the space project was valued, the shortage of American scientists and engineers soon appeared, and various plans to fund the cultivation of scientists and engineers appeared.
However, it takes time to train talents, from stimulating high school students' interest in science and engineering to graduates who have trained undergraduate and senior degrees from college and senior degrees, it takes at least five to six years.Time lag will make people want to regulate that thermostat and increase investment. Finally, scientists and engineers provide excess supply.After the spread of surplus, it also affected the selection of these majors of these majors, which led to the shortage of the next round.
China's industrial policy is often overwhelmed, because the focus of the policy is to select winners, and the implementation of the policy depends mainly on local governments.Whenever the central government issues an industrial policy, the local government will actively cooperate.More than 3,000 local governments in provinces, cities, and counties often have one coaxing and promoting policy implementation in various forms of subsidies and rewards.
Due to the lag between investment and production, the blindness of investment is often not reflected in the short term.But for a long time, companies swarming up under the driver of distorted incentives will soon generate excess capacity, and excess supply will lead to competition for price cutting.In the end, most companies went bankrupt at a loss, and most of the loans became dull accounts for financial institutions, and some companies became zombie companies that need banks that need to be continuously transfushed by banks.
Professor Huang Shaoqing of Shanghai Jiaotong University and his collaborators have studied the relationship between industrial policy and zombie companies in the past few years.They found that if an industry was supported by the government as a key industry, the proportion of government subsidies was high, and the proportion of zombie companies in the industry in the following years would increase and production efficiency declined.
Chen Qingtai, former deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, believes that the industrial policy has played a more positive role after the planned economy withdrawing, but at this stage, the implementation of industrial policies has been lost.He believes that the current industrial policy is too strong to intervene in the market, weaken the innovative driving force of the enterprise, cause the enterprise to inertia and dependence, and it is also prone to corruption.
China's industrial policy has caused many problems in the country. The phenomenon of over -adjusting has caused the government and academic circles to reflect on the government and academia. Many results obviously make the policy maker surprise and not what they want to see.However, China's industrial policy is considered a strategic weapon for China's competitiveness to improve the competitiveness of manufacturing.They noticed that whenever the Chinese government introduced policies to support a certain industry, the rapidly expanding production capacity will make Chinese -made products full of international markets in this industry.Subsequently, most companies were defeated during the cutting price war, while some Chinese companies, especially state -owned enterprises, could survive because they had funding support from state -owned banks.
From steel, glass, cement, to photovoltaic products and new energy vehicles, what they see is the same plot, so it is easy to draw a conclusion that the Chinese government uses industrial policies to make unfair competition, and its expectations will reach the market share.The purpose of monopoly.As Xue Ling said, when they thought it was the goal of the Chinese government, they could easily exaggerate the benefits of China's industrial policy.
Objectively speaking, the policy maker of the Chinese central government's implementation of one policy cannot be evaluated in advance, because the actual effects of many policies depends on how local governments cooperate.Due to the large regional differences in China, local governments at all levels have considerable autonomy when implementing the central policy.During the implementation of a policy, if the local government is added, the final effect may surprise the central government; if it is a layer of discounts, it will eventually enter the sea like mud, so that the policy maker issues a decree to sigh in Zhongnanhai.
Local governments are often too hard in the implementation of industrial policy, and the photovoltaic industry is an example.When national policies began to support this industry more than ten years ago, almost all provinces supported photovoltaic as its key development industry.As a result, the production scale of Chinese photovoltaic products has grown rapidly, and by 2012, it has been in a leading position in the global market.
Due to most of the exports of photovoltaic products produced in China at that time, the EU and the United States started the anti -dumping mechanism in the international market.After the export is limited, many photovoltaic companies are facing closure. In 2013, the Chinese State Council launched policy subsidies for photovoltaic power stations to allow domestic photovoltaic markets to digest excess photovoltaic products.If the state has subsidy policies, the local government follows closely.It is only a province in Zhejiang. In addition to the provincial government's subsidies for distributed photovoltaic power stations, eight cities, 20 districts and county governments also have subsidies.Not only subsidize the electricity price, but also the initial investment.
How much subsidies do governments at all levels have provided a total of total for the photovoltaic industry?No one may know the answer.Supporting policies have set off a wave of installations in photovoltaic power generation in China, and the total installed capacity has accounted for 0.6%in the global market share from 0.6%in 2008 to 45.7%in 2016.The rapid growth of the domestic market has further stimulated the production of laser products.
Global photovoltaic component shipments in 2018Of the top 10 companies, nine are from China.In a short period of time, China has become the largest photovoltaic product producer.However, most photovoltaic companies have problems with high subsidies, high investment, high debt, and low -core technical content, and cannot negative their own profit and loss.In order to alleviate the pressure of fiscal subsidies and prevent the continued deterioration of overcapacity, the Ministry of Finance, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a joint notice last year, announcing the reduction of subsidies for photovoltaic power generation and restricting the construction of photovoltaic power stations.This decision stepped on the rapid development of the photovoltaic industry.Many small companies have closed down, and large enterprises have stopped production, reduced production, and layoffs. Some also sold their subordinate power stations or subsidiaries.
How to explain the excessive reaction of local governments to industrial policies?In the micro -motivation and macro behavior, Xue Ling took the traditional custom of sending the Christmas card as an example to explain how the activity evolved into a thing that everyone was very hurt.
First of all, people feel that they should send cards to those who are expected to send their Christmas cards.Second, they also know that they will receive the card because the cardholder also expected that they will send the card.Third, people choose to send cards as soon as possible to avoid cardholders suspected that they first received the card before returning the card.Fourth, people sometimes send cards because they have been sending for many years, and stop sending cards will give people an obvious signal, so it is easy to cause misunderstandings.Also, sometimes students send cards to teachers because they believe that other students have sent them.
As a result, the list of cards is getting longer and longer.People are no longer the responsibility for festivals and friendship, but to accumulate.This activity became ridiculous, ridiculous, and stupid, and became a trap.Everyone, like everyone, lamented that they were trapped in traps and could not extricate themselves.However, no one has the courage to stand up and call for the stop, because it is troublesome and obstructive.Fortunately, the activities of sending the Christmas card are no longer popular today.
For the attitude of central policies, the mentality of the person in charge of the local government is similar to those who send the Christmas card.Under the centralized system, the main person in charge of the local government was appointed by superiors.After the central government has issued a policy, it is expected that the local awareness will be conscious and will resolutely implement the central government's policy.The place knows that the central government has this expectation, so follow the command stick.Moreover, other local governments will also put pressure on the implementation of central policies. They are worried that they will not keep up tight enough, and the implementation is not strong enough, or it is seen that it is because others move themselves.
It is important that industrial policy will bring benefits to local governments.There are central policies to start, investment projects are easy to approve, bank loans are easy to obtain, and domestic GDP (GDP) growth tasks are easy to complete.Even if the support of choosing the industry is unsuccessful, local governments do not need to bear any responsibility for the failure of the policy, because this policy is formulated by the central government.In addition, the incentive mechanism of industrial policies (such as fiscal subsidies, tax discounts, leading corporate status, etc.) also easily bring rent -seeking behaviors, providing corrupt officials with opportunities for renting and renting.
In recent years, industrial policies have been very controversial in China.Although supporters adhere to the necessity of implementing industrial policies, the examples of successful industrial policy cannot be found.However, industrial policies have a great impact in foreign countries, causing sufficient attention from foreign policy makers, or filed lawsuits to the World Trade Organization, counter -dumping, counter -subsidy measures, or setting detailed terms in the cross -Pacific partnership agreement agreement.response.
Industrial policies and state -owned enterprises have also become the main issues in Sino -US trade negotiations.Xue Ling had a great influence on decision makers during his lifetime. What would he react if he saw this problem?Perhaps he would warn the US government that it would be easy to make mistakes by speculating about others' intentions; maybe he would suggest that the Chinese government reviews industrial policies, prevent over -adjusting, and avoid misunderstandings.However, it is easy to make mistakes. It is more difficult to recognize and correct mistakes. It is even more difficult to build mutual trust.
The author is the National University of Singapore
Li Guangyao's China Project Director of the School of Public Policy
