The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
复制标题
狭窄的走廊：国家、社会和自由的命运
DOI：
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
R. Wade
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
R. Wade
《狭窄的走廊》被誉为里程碑，其规模与皮凯蒂（2014）的《二十一世纪资本》的规模差不多，但不完全一样——而且正文长达 500 页，几乎一样长。与皮凯蒂一样，其核心论点既简单又大胆。这本书旨在解释当今世界富国和穷国之间在自由和繁荣方面的差距——这种差距在三个世纪前几乎不存在，希望三个世纪后也不会存在。这一论点还与当今世界的另外两个基本特征相关：中国在世界体系中的经济和政治崛起；以及包括美国在内的繁荣民主国家对“民主”日益失望。截至 2021 年，从 Covid-19 疫苗的全球分布情况来看，财富、权力和有效政府的两极分配每天都在我们面前：占世界人口一小部分的北方国家已经获得了世界上大部分疫苗，并有望（截至 2021 年中后期）对其大部分成年人口进行双重疫苗接种，甚至提供加强疫苗接种，而南方国家的大多数人口尚未接种疫苗。单剂量。繁荣和自由的两极分布的更大图景来自于对以下问题的回答：在过去的两个世纪里，有多少非西方国家变得发达国家？答案取决于我们对“非西方”、“国家”和“发达国家”的分类范围。将这些类别扩展到合理的极限（不包括人口很少的国家），答案不到 10 个。其中包括日本、俄罗斯、香港、新加坡、台湾、韩国和以色列，这些国家的人口加起来只占世界人口的一小部分。如果我们将南方分为六个地区，并追踪其 1970 年以来的平均货币收入占北方平均货币收入的比例，我们会令人震惊地看到，它们的轨迹都相当水平，没有一个以持续的方式上升，就好像受到重力的抑制一样。与北方的差距仍然很大，在物质繁荣方面几乎没有“赶上”的迹象（尽管有些人在预期寿命方面有所赶上）。这是排除中国的情况。因此，“发达国家”和“发展中国家”之间的区别在 21 世纪仍然像 20 世纪 70 年代一样明显，中国除外，尽管所有的祝贺都说由于赶超，这种区别现在已经过时了。除了少数例外，追赶性收入流动性的整体记录不佳 — — 尽管存在着帮助“发展中国家”的庞大西方援助产业，尽管大规模的贸易和生产全球化在西方思想中被视为“追赶”的皇家途径（如马丁·沃尔夫（Martin Wolf）的《为什么全球化有效》，2004年） — — 是世界上最重要且显然最棘手的问题之一，应该与全球变暖一样成为经济和政治科学的前沿和中心。
The Narrow Corridor has been hailed as a landmark, almost but not quite on the scale of Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-first Century – and at 500 pages of text, almost as long. Like Piketty’s, the core argument is simple and breathtakingly audacious. The book aims to explain the gap in both liberty and prosperity between rich and poor countries in today’s world – a gap that hardly existed three centuries ago and hopefully will not exist three centuries from now. The argument is also relevant to two other fundamental features of today’s world: the economic and political rise of China in the world system; and the rising disenchantment with ‘democracy’ in prosperous democracies, including in the United States. As of 2021, the bipolar distribution of wealth, power, and effective government is in our face every day from the global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines: countries of the North, with a small share of the world’s population, have obtained most of the world’s vaccines and are on track (as of mid-to-late 2021) to double-vaccinate most of their adult populations, even to offer booster vaccinations, while most of the population of the South have yet to receive a single dose. The bigger picture of the bipolar distribution of prosperity and liberty comes from the answer to the question: in the past two centuries, how many non-western countries have become developed? The answer depends on how broadly we classify ‘non-western’, ‘countries’ and ‘developed’. Expanding these categories to the limits of plausibility (excluding countries with very small populations), the answer is less than 10. It includes Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel, which together account for a tiny sliver of world population. If we divide the South into six regions and track their average monetary income from 1970 as a fraction of the average monetary income of the North, we see – shockingly – that they all track fairly horizontally, none rising up in a sustained way, as though held down by gravity. The gap with the North remains large, with little sign of ‘catch up’ in material prosperity (though some catch up in life expectancy). This is the picture with China excluded. So the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries remains as marked in the twentyfirst century as in the 1970s, China excluded, despite all the congratulatory talk that it is now obsolete thanks to catch-up. The few exceptions aside, the overall poor record of catchup income mobility – despite the existence of a huge western aid industry to help ‘ developing countries’ and despite trade and production globalisation on a massive scale celebrated in western thinking as the royal route to ‘catch up’ (as in Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works, 2004) – is one of the world’s most important and apparently intractable problems, and should be front and centre of economics and political science, up there with global warming.
DOI：
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发表时间：
2011
期刊：
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影响因子：
--
作者：
Besley Timothy
通讯作者：
Besley Timothy