American Economic Association Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth : The Anatomy of Urban Crisis
American Economic Association Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth : The Anatomy of Urban Crisis
复制标题
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2007
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
W. Baumol
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
W. Baumol
有一些经济力量是如此强大，以至于它们不断地冲破为镇压它们而设置的所有障碍。例如，这就是供需力量，它们抵制了中世纪废除高利贷的努力，以及当代控制价格的努力。在这篇文章中，我讨论了我认为的另一种这样的机制，它已经改变了过去，似乎可能会在未来留下它的特征。它帮助我们了解各种经济服务的未来角色：市政府、教育、表演艺术、餐馆和休闲活动。我认为，在每一项活动的技术结构中，都有一些力量几乎不可避免地推动供应这些活动所产生的实际成本的逐步和累积增加。因此，抵消这些成本增加的努力虽然可能暂时取得成功，但从长远来看，只是权宜之计，对潜在趋势不会产生重大影响。宏观经济模型的合理性主要应在于其对观察到的现象的运作提供洞察的能力。它将各种变量聚集在一起，通常会让它失去微观经济分析最好的那种优雅和严谨。然而，宏观模型已经成功地解释了实际问题的结构，并在一定程度上为政策提供了指导，这在一定程度上是更费力的经济分析模式迄今未能做到的。本文希望沿袭传统--其基本模式的结构是初级的。然而，它或许可以为我们这一代人的各种经济问题提供一些线索。
There are some economic forces so powerful that they constantly break through all barriers erected for their suppression. Such, for example, are the forces of supply and demand which have resisted alike medieval efforts to abolish usury and contemporary attempts to control prices. In this paper I discuss what I believe to be another such mechanism which has colored the past and seems likely to stamp its character on the future. It helps us to understand the prospective roles of a wide variety of economic services: municipal government, education, the performing arts, restaurants, and leisure time activity. I will argue that inherent in the technological structure of each of these activities are forces working almost unavoidably for progressive and cumulative increases in the real costs incurred in supplying them. As a consequence, efforts to offset these cost increases, while they may succeed temporarily, in the long run are merely palliatives which can have no significant effect on the underlying trends. The justification of a macroeconomic model should reside primarily in its ability to provide insights into the workings of observed phenomena. Its aggregation of diverse variables usually deny it the elegance and the rigor that are provided by microeconomic analysis at its best. Yet macro models have succeeded in explaining the structure of practical problems and in offering guidance for policy to a degree that has so far eluded the more painstaking modes of economic analysis. This article hopes to follow in the tradition-the structure of its basic model is rudimentary. Yet it can perhaps shed some light on a variety of economic problems of our generation.