Liu Chunyong
Peking University Japanese Department, Grade 99.
After the Second World War, especially in the 1960s and 1990s, East Asia's economy has made remarkable achievements, which can be said that the stars are shining, and the most dazzling one is probably Japan, which has moved from ruins to a modern economic power. Although Japan's economy began to decline after the 1990s, the prospect of economic development is still not optimistic. However, its 40-year economic prosperity can not be ignored by anyone, and its experience is also worth learning from. After the reform and opening up, China's economy has made rapid progress, creating another world miracle. In recent years, the world economy has declined as a whole, while China has stood out and maintained a relatively large growth. Nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact that our reform has entered a "bottleneck". How to maintain the rapid economic development through "bottleneck" is an urgent problem we need to solve now, and the experience of Japan may give us some enlightenment.
There are different explanations in academic circles on how Japan and the four Asian Little Dragons can achieve rapid economic growth and catch up with developed economies. There is a view that there is a profound cultural root behind the miracle, namely the influence of Confucian culture. Obviously, we can't fully accept this statement, because the more developed economies are European and American countries that don't understand Confucianism. Max Weber even thinks extremely that capitalist economy can't achieve great development in China, Japan and even East Asia without Protestant ethics. (1) Of course, this is not credible, because the East Asian miracle is the best proof, but it should be pointed out that the cultural interpretation of The Analects of Confucius and the abacus seems to be only to refute Max Weber's point of view, so it is inevitable to be extreme, so we can't expect to find the root of Japan's rapid post-war economic growth from a cultural perspective, and economic problems need to be explained from an economic perspective. At the same time, we have to admit that Japan's ideology and culture played a lubricant role in the high-speed economic train after the war. Then it leads to two problems to be explained in this paper, the economic explanation of Japan's rapid economic growth after the war and the promotion of ideology and culture to the economy at that time. The purpose of this study is to draw lessons from experience. Therefore, the third part of this paper puts forward some enlightenment to the development of China from the previous analysis.
First, the comparative advantage strategy
There are many economic explanations for Japan's rapid growth after World War II, and Lin Yifu, a famous economist in China, classified it into three types. (2) The first is represented by economists of the World Bank, who believe that the reason for the rapid growth is the implementation of a free market economy, less price distortion, proper resource allocation and high efficiency. However, from the process of Japan's economic development, we can clearly see the government's active intervention in the economy, especially from the post-war to the mid-1960s, the "control" characteristics of Japan's economy were quite obvious, because in the recovery period, Japan's industry was extremely weak and would soon collapse without government support. Obviously, this explanation over-idealizes the real economy. The second explanation is just the opposite, represented by Alice Armstrong, an economist at MIT, and Robert Wade, a British economist. They believe that the economic success of Japan and even the four little dragons in Asia is the result of the government's strong intervention in the market, conscious distortion of the role of price restrictions in the market and the use of industrial policies to support some key strategic industries. However, what we know is that there are more examples of controlled economic development being blocked in reality. The market with distorted factor prices is obviously not conducive to economic development, especially for the big market that is difficult for the government to completely control, and the real period of rapid growth in Japan began after the government gradually reduced its direct intervention in the market in the 1960s. The third explanation attributes Japan's success to its export-oriented development policy. Indeed, extroversion is a major feature of Japan's economy and one of the necessary conditions for the development of modern economy. In recent years, the rapid development of China's economy has also benefited from opening to the outside world. However, as long as it is open, it will not develop. Just as China needs reform in opening up, the choice of Japanese internal strategy and policy is equally important, even more important. Simple opening up will not only bring about development, but will often lead to the collapse of the domestic economy, which shows that extroversion is far from a necessary and sufficient condition for economic development.
The above three hypotheses all explain some problems in Japan's economic growth, but they can't perfectly explain all of them, so we should introduce another development strategy-comparative advantage strategy to make a more logical explanation. (3) The comparative advantage strategy does not deny the previous three assumptions, but combines them into one, pointing out the more fundamental thing behind the three assumptions-comparative advantage, which takes these three assumptions as the conditions for realizing comparative advantage, thus making a more profound and reasonable explanation.
This comparative advantage strategy is based on the theory of international division of labor. The publication of Adam Smith's Study on the Nature and Causes of National Wealth from 65438 to 0776 is the beginning of the traditional western theory of international division of labor. He believes that the criterion for judging whether a commodity in a country is cheap depends on whether a country has an absolute advantage in the production cost of a commodity. "As long as country A has this advantage and country B does not, it is better for country B to buy from country A than to make it itself." (4) Therefore, the international division of labor formed by producing goods with absolute advantages and importing goods at a disadvantage can make all trading subjects gain more benefits. Of course, this division of labor belongs to pareto efficient. However, Smith ignored the fact that a country can still participate in national trade when all its production is at an absolute disadvantage, so it cannot be used as a basic theory in international trade. So david ricardo put forward a scientific theory of comparative advantage in his book Principles of Political Economy and Taxation published by 18 17, that is, a country not only needs to produce products with absolute advantages, but also only needs to produce products with comparative advantages in its own product structure, and the interests of all trading subjects can be improved through national trade. This constitutes the core of the western traditional international division of labor theory. 100 years later, Swedish economists Erie Heckschel and Berthier Olin put forward the theory of factor endowment, abandoned the classical labor theory of value, and attributed the main reason of international trade to the price difference caused by the difference of factor endowment among countries. It emphasizes that "regardless of the influence of different demand conditions, the endowment difference of production factors between regions can sometimes be so great as to determine the basic nature of trade", and (5) thus "importing those cheap goods with a large proportion of production factors". (6) In other words, if a country is relatively rich in labor resources and relatively lacking in capital, then the endowment structure of its production factors determines that its comparative advantage lies in labor-intensive industries, because the development of labor-intensive industries can make better use of cheap labor resources to reduce costs and thus become more competitive in international trade.
Following comparative advantage, the economic development path of developing advantageous industries is comparative advantage strategy. The development of comparative advantage strategy first requires opening to the outside world and participating in international trade; Secondly, we should encourage free competition and let the market play its role, so that the price can accurately reflect China's comparative advantage, so as to better follow the comparative advantage to develop the economy; Thirdly, because enterprises can't fully understand their comparative advantages, the government should adopt appropriate policies, provide complete information, guide enterprises to enter industries with comparative advantages, and promote industrial upgrading in time. It can be seen that the three assumptions mentioned above are the conditions for developing the comparative advantage strategy, and they all partially reflect the characteristics of Japan's postwar economy, so we can also imagine that Japan's postwar economy is developing rapidly following the comparative advantage strategy.
Shortly after the war, Japan's economy and society were on the verge of collapse. 40% of the folk wealth has been lost, and the remaining machinery and equipment are outdated. The industrial output of 1946 is only 6.6% of that before the war. The biggest loss was in ships, which decreased from 6.3 million tons to 6.5438+0.53 million tons, leaving only 24%. At 1945, the rice yield also dropped to 60% of the average yield. (7) In the early postwar period, Japan's endowment status of production factors was: low capital stock level, backward technology level, narrow land area, poor domestic resources, insufficient funds for raw materials, and only surplus labor. Japanese economist Haruhiko Kuroda pointed out: "Under this endowment of production factors, as long as Japan adheres to the industrialization based on the traditional international division of labor theory such as the Hector Schell-Olin model, it will inevitably choose the labor-intensive industrialization road." (8) However, this seems to be different from Japan's choice at that time. After Japan established the idea of "building a country through trade", it finally chose the road of heavy chemical industrialization with large economies of scale, strong ability to absorb employment and capital-intensive, and adopted a series of protection and support measures for industries with weak foundations such as steel, machinery, oil refining, petrochemicals and automobiles. (9) This is different from the choice of comparative advantage strategy to some extent, which is mainly caused by the special international environment that Japan faced after the war. After the war, the United States gave great assistance to Japan for political reasons. It was with these aid funds and equipment and cheap labor that Japan was able to implement the "tilted production" policy at that time. 1949, the United States stopped aid, and Japan's economy immediately got into trouble, which also reflected the great role of American aid in "tilting production" in Japan. Fortunately for Japan, however, the "special needs" brought by the Korean War in June 1950 gave Japan a huge development opportunity, which enabled Japan to use its limited funds for high-return capital-intensive industries, thus accumulating a large amount of capital quickly in a short time without distorting the price greatly, thus avoiding the harm and cost of a series of "tilted production" brought about by it. Of course, the special international environment cannot explain everything. In fact, when Japan put forward the strategy of giving priority to the development of heavy industry in the 1950s, the per capita GNP had reached more than 1/4 of that of the United States (10). Moreover, during the economic recovery period from the end of World War II to the 1950s, Japan did not give up labor-intensive industries, and light industries such as textiles and clothing and the most successful shipbuilding industry in Japan also accumulated rapidly for Japan. It can be seen that Japan's policy choice in the early postwar period cannot constitute a counterexample of its comparative advantage strategy. The most important experience of Japan's rapid development lies not only in following comparative advantages, but also in promoting industrial structure upgrading in time according to the theory of dynamic comparative advantages. The relative position of any country's economy in the world economy is changing, because the economic development of each country is a dynamic process. In this process, all economic factors, including factor endowment, will change, which means that the comparative advantages or disadvantages of some industrial products in a country will be replaced, so the change of factor endowment structure in backward countries will make them have dynamic comparative advantages, which will directly affect the outward development of the national economy and the international division of labor model. (1 1) Since the 1960s, Japan's economy has fully recovered, and its per capita GNP has reached more than 1/3 of that of the United States. The factor endowment structure is also very different from that just after the war, and the capital stock has been greatly improved. At the same time, the labor price, that is, the wages of workers, has also increased substantially, and the comparative advantage has shifted from labor to capital. Under such a factor endowment structure, the government intervened in the economy in time, promoted the development of industrial structure to energy-intensive and material-intensive industries, introduced foreign advanced technology, and increased social capital investment to develop economies of scale, thus opening the door to rapid economic growth.
An exogenous economic development strategy needs a certain endogenous economic system to adapt to it. Therefore, under the factor endowment structure of Japan at that time, once the comparative advantage strategy was determined, a certain economic system was determined by three conditions for developing the comparative advantage strategy, namely, an export-oriented economic system based on market regulation under the macro guidance of the government. Try to implement a free market economy in the macro-policy environment, so that the market price can reflect the scarcity of production factors, thus creating conditions for implementing the comparative advantage strategy; In the resource allocation system, the market mainly allocates production factors independently, so that resources can be allocated to various industries reasonably; Encourage fair competition among enterprises in micro-management mechanism, so that enterprises have to improve technology and reduce costs to enhance their competitiveness. In 1950s and 1960s, although the Ministry of International Trade and Industry restricted new enterprises from entering the heavy chemical industry and importing similar products, it also required existing enterprises to compete with each other. Theoretically, an endogenous economic system can be determined by development strategy and factor endowment structure. The economic benefit directly depends on whether the development strategy conforms to the factor endowment structure. The so-called built-in stabilizer in macroeconomics, that is, the automatic regulation performance of financial system in modern economy and the internal regulation mechanism formed by fierce competition between producers and operators in microeconomics, will do other work well. However, in practice, the functions of these two regulatory mechanisms are limited. "The function of the internal stabilizer is to reduce any fluctuation of the economic system, and it cannot eliminate the fluctuation 100%. The task of fiscal and monetary policy is to eliminate the fluctuations it leaves behind. " (12) The competition mechanism in micro-economy is far from perfect, and complete free competition often leads to chaos. In addition, the "connection" and communication between macro and micro are more difficult to solve by automatic adjustment alone, so the coordination role of the government in the basically determined endogenous economic system is particularly important. Of course, we will not forget that industrial policy must play its coordinating role on the premise of a sound market mechanism, and its impact on the economy can only be realized through the market mechanism. In the early postwar period, the Japanese government used to control the economic system, directly controlling materials, funds, prices and foreign trade, which effectively promoted the economic recovery, but also inhibited the role of the market mechanism, making it difficult to improve the production efficiency of enterprises and lacking vitality. By April 1952, the Japanese government abolished the Law on the Adjustment of Supply and Demand of Temporary Materials, ending the strict restrictions on industrial products and their production. In July of the same year, the "Economic Stability Headquarters", the highest management institution that controlled the economy, was revoked and replaced by the Ministry of Economic Planning. At this point, Japan has completed the transformation from a controlled economy to a market economy, and the government's function has also changed to coordinate macroeconomic and microeconomic development and make up for market defects. It should be pointed out that the Japanese government's industrial policy is also market-oriented and implemented within the framework of the price mechanism. Generally, the government does not directly intervene in enterprise decision-making, but uses informal persuasion to guide the enterprise. (13) The industrial sectors of "direct government intervention in many aspects" are transportation and communication, service industry and financial sector, which are of special significance to the development of national economy. Therefore, the Japanese government's direct intervention in microeconomics is also selective, which has not stifled the role of market mechanism, and further promoted the coordination between macroeconomics and microeconomics on the basis of market price mechanism.
At this point, we can basically make it clear that the root of Japan's rapid economic growth after the war lies in choosing the correct development strategy and coordinating the relationship between macro-economy and micro-economy. Of course, we can also put forward other factors that promote Japan's rapid economic growth. For example, with the development of education, the number of universities in Japan is almost equal to the sum of universities in western Europe; Scientific and technological progress, although the Japanese are not good at theoretical breakthroughs or innovations, they do seem to have some talents in absorbing and improving foreign advanced technologies. The rapid growth of Japan's economy has also benefited from catching the train of the third scientific and technological revolution; High savings rate and the highest savings rate in the world promote the rapid accumulation of capital, and so on. But in any case, the most fundamental reason is that the development strategy conforms to the factor endowment structure at that time and gives play to the comparative advantage, which is also one of the problems to be explained in this paper.