虹桥观点 “虹桥观点”栏目，旨在汇集虹桥国际经济论坛政商学研各界代表重要观点，为凝聚开放共识、促进全球开放贡献虹桥智慧。

以下为纽约大学教授、北京大学名誉教授、诺贝尔经济学奖获得者托马斯·萨金特在《世界开放报告2022》发布暨国际研讨会的主旨演讲：

大家好！我是托马斯·萨金特，非常高兴能够分享我对《世界开放报告2022》的一些看法。

我将通过展示幻灯片向各位阐述我的观点。首先，这是一份精彩绝伦的报告。我仔细阅读了它，很多内容我都非常赞赏。这是一份了不起的报告，犹如一个宝藏、一座金矿。它有说服力地阐述了一系列问题。其中关于贸易和经济增长的理论被引述和呈现得恰到好处。它还包含贸易和经济增长的思想演变史、经济政策和结果的历史沿袭，是笔由大量实证数据构成的财富。除了对历史的叙述，报告也很好地描述了世界货物和服务贸易开放及思想跨国流动的现状与前景、挑战与机遇。

接下来，我将介绍报告中我最喜欢的部分。我有太多喜欢的内容，但这次我只介绍第三章讲述历史的这部分。我喜欢历史，特别是经济史和经济思想史。报告第三章讲述了开放的历史。此外，这一章还包含了来自多个国家、多种实例的实证检验，描述了开放度的U型演进。其中美国的开放史让我产生了强烈的共鸣。

19世纪，我们曾一度使用关税来保护行业，采取关税保护措施将近100年。而在20世纪中叶，我们转向开放。报告中描述的U型模式不仅仅适用于美国。我最喜欢的另一点是报告对数字技术的描述，及其对开放影响的展望，这些内容分布在不同的章节中。另一个贯穿多个章节的主题是贸易壁垒，国际间、甚至国家内部的贸易壁垒为寻租行为提供了非常重要的激励。

该报告为开放的自然壁垒和非自然壁垒提供了一个非常好的视角。与技术、运输和通讯成本相关的部分自然壁垒限制了贸易，但这些壁垒都呈下降趋势。

交通、通讯成本下降给了我们前所未有的开放机会。但是非自然壁垒依旧存在，这些壁垒与物理层面的技术问题无关。我将关税、配额，以及其他保护本地垄断、限制外国竞争的措施，称为非自然壁垒。在识别这些因素，描述它们的成因及影响方面，该报告做了卓有成效的工作。我是一名经济学家，经济学的传统就是研究非自然壁垒成本，它们保护本地的、国内的垄断，造成效率损失，进而损害到国内消费者、其他生产者和贸易伙伴的利益。

我再谈谈作为报告主题之一的垄断，以及为什么经济学家不喜欢垄断，为什么他们倾向于支持开放。

经济学界有一种关于垄断的标准理论，还有一种新理论。我想谈些关于新理论的内容。标准理论认为，垄断者会提高价格并减少产量，这对垄断者有益。虽然垄断者会获得更多的利润，但这伤害了其他参与者的利益，损害了潜在的竞争企业和消费者的利益。垄断行业生产的太少，其他行业生产的太多，导致行业之间存在资源错配。这就是垄断的标准理论。

经济学家一直试图估算垄断的成本，哈伯格（Harberger）对此有一项著名的研究。他不喜欢垄断，但却惊讶地发现垄断成本在 GDP 中所占的比例并不是很大。多年以来，哈伯格以及其他相关研究的数据，让很多经济学家和政策制定者相信不需要对垄断太过担心。

但是最近的研究表明，确实需要担心垄断。最新的证据是基于著名经济学家希克斯（Hicks）的洞见：垄断者最大的受益是安宁的日子。垄断者变得更低效、懒惰，垄断造成企业内资源配置效率的低下。我想要介绍一位我钦佩的经济学家詹姆斯·施密茨（James Schmitz）的一系列研究。他在明尼阿波利斯的联邦储备银行工作，对企业内部真实的资源配置、资源配置的效率和成本等问题进行了非常详细的研究。他对比了水泥、钢铁、矿产品、糖这几个特定行业的产出并描述了观测到的结果。长期以来，保护美国垄断者的贸易壁垒保护着这些行业，产生了较高的关税及运输成本。

而后这些壁垒下降了，大多数的非自然壁垒下降了。竞争者得以进入并威胁到了垄断者，这使效率大幅提高，比哈伯格估计的大得多。垄断的标准理论忽略了这一点——保护垄断导致垄断者实际上并没有将成本最小化，他们的行为比标准理论预测的更糟糕。它导致了寻租行为，增加了无谓损失，所以我在开放报告的相关主题下多次看到这一点。詹姆斯·施密茨已经为这些观点提供了数据支撑和很多重要的细节，而且他优秀的学术成果可以在其他情境下复现。

詹姆斯·施密茨的研究结果在实质内容与表达精神上，与我在《世界开放报告》中看到的贯穿始终的主题是一致的。两者在论述开放收益时，都选择了同样令人信服的案例。

就我个人而言，作为一国公民，从他国进口产品中、从他国输出的想法中以及其他东西上均有获益。作为开源软件很小的参与方，我如今仍从中受益匪浅。想要推进社会进步的人士创建这些可以在全球范围内使用的软件，并将其慷慨地免费共享，正是这种开放精神创造了机会，推动数字技术向前发展。

最后，我诚挚祝贺并由衷感谢这篇报告的撰写者们，我会反复阅读它的。

谢谢大家！

Thomas J. Sargent

NYU and PHBS Business School, Peking University

October 2022

Hi. My name is Thomas Sargent. And I want to share some of my thoughts about the new World Openness Report 2022. I am really happy to be able to do this.

I'm gonna share some slides with you. So here goes to give you some of my reaction. The first thing, I think this is a magnificent report. I read it carefully and appreciated many things about it. So, I'll say it's a treasure and it's a gold mine. It eloquently presents a number of things. Theories of trade and economic growth are really well stated and beautifully presented. Histories of thoughts about trade and economic growth and economic policy, histories of policies and outcomes, just a wealth of empirical evidence. And beyond history it gives a very good description of current state of and prospects for world openness of trade in goods and services and ideas across countries and describes both headwinds and opportunities, challenges and opportunities.

I let me tell you some of my favorites. I’ve a number of favorites, but I just want to mention here histories in Chapter three. I love history, economic history and the history of economic ideas. Chapter three has a history of openness. In addition, it has empirical evidence from across a number of countries, a number of experiences and describes a U shape of openness, particularly one thing that resonates with me is the history of openness in the United States.

There was a time in the 19th century where we use tariffs to protect industries. We did that for almost 100 years. And then in the 20th century, middle of the 20th century we opened up. So the U shape that pattern that they described is not just for the United States. Then another thing that some of my favorites are descriptions about digital technologies and prospects they offer for affecting openness. So that's present in a variety of chapters. And then another theme that runs through a number of chapters is how barriers to trade, barriers to international trade, or even within a country, they create rent seeking incentives that are really important, so very well done.

And then I think the report gives a really good perspective on what you could call natural and unnatural barriers to openness. So there's some natural ones that are connected with technologies, transportation, and communication costs, limit trade, and both of those have been falling.

So there's a force, the falling low transportation and communication costs, something that gives us opportunities for openness that we didn't have before. But then there's unnatural, not in the physical technology, tariffs, quotas, various other items that protect their design to protect local monopolies and inhibit competition. From abroad, I call they are natural. And the report is really a good job of identifying those and describing some of their causes and consequences. Some of these costs are unnatural barriers. I'm an economist, and you know, our tradition in economic system is to list those costs. They are substantial. There're inefficiencies associated with protecting local or national monopoly and they do harm to domestic consumers and other producers, to say nothing about our trading partners.

I'll say a little bit about monopoly, which is one of the themes and why economists don't like monopoly and why they tend to be prejudiced in turn in favor of openness.

About monopoly, there's a standard theory and then there's a new theory. I want to say a few things about the new theory. Standard theory is, well, what a monopolist does is to set prices and low outputs, and that helps the owners of the monopoly. The people who own monopoly, get more profits, but that hurts other parties and people. It harms potential competing entrepreneurs. It harms consumers. Too little is produced in a monopolized industry, too much in other industries. There's a misallocation of resources across industries. That's what monopoly does. That's the standard theory.

Economists have tried to estimate the cost of monopoly and there's a famous study by Harberger. He didn't like monopolies, but he was surprised at what he found. He said there were costs, but they weren’t a big percentage of GDP. And for a number of years, Harberger’s numbers and similar ones convinced a lot of economists and policymakers that you really didn't have to worry about monopoly.

But there's some new work that says you really should worry about monopoly. And more recent evidence is built on the famous economist Hicks’s insight that the benefits of monopoly or quiet life. So monopolists become less efficient and lazy. So this is all about the inefficient allocation of resources within firms. So I want to point you to some, a line of work by an economist I admire. James Schmiz works in a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He's done very detailed studies of real resource allocations, the efficiency and cost effectiveness of resource allocations within firms. Any contrast, the contrast industry outcomes in particular industry, cement, iron, ore, sugar. And he describes what happens is you could think of them as experiments that were done. For a long time these industries were protected with trade barriers that protected US monopolies. There were tariffs or transportation costs.

And then what happened is those barriers dropped. Most of the unnatural barriers dropped. So competition came in and threatened the monopolies. The consequences were that there are big increases in efficiency. There were much bigger than Harberger would have predicted. And the standard theory on monopoly leaves this out. So monopoly protection leads to this insight that monopolists actually don't minimize costs. They behave worse than the standard theory predicts. So it promotes rent sinking and increases dead weight losses. So I'll just mention that very much in the theme of this openness report, James Schmitz has put numbers and lots of details on these ideas. And I think his very interesting scholarly work can be repeated in other contexts.

I just want to say that the spirit and the substance of James Schmitz’s findings align really well with themes that I see running through the World Openness Report. And there's a shared convincing case in both instances of the benefits of openness.

I want to close by saying I personally have benefited from importing from other countries, exporting ideas and other things to me as a citizen of my country. And right now I benefit immensely from open-source software, which I'm a small participant in it. People create software that is available worldwide and it's freely shared by generous people who want to push forward. They have pushed out the frontiers of digital technology using the opportunities made to possible by openness. And I just want to congratulate and many thanks for people who wrote this report and I'll reread it again.

Thank you very much!