Study On Essence & Efficiency Of Institutional Change From The Interests Angle

Constructing overall harmonious well-to-do society is the main goal of our country's current and future reform, and in order to realize this goal we must coordinate well the interests of different groups. At the beginning of the reform, the government set up certain reform route which prefers efficiency to fairness. Although this kind of reform made remarkable achievements which had been proved by the twenty years' experiences, it also broaden the income gap, moreover, with the system reform stepping further, this gap trend would expand continuously effected by "path dependence" system. The excessive income gap goes against the essence requirement of socialism, meanwhile leads to many social contradictions which will influence the stability and development of society.Therefore, comrade JiangZeMin put forward the new wealth distribution discipline in the report of the 16th NPC, which indicated that "during the first distribution period, we should pay attention to efficiency, give full play to market, encourage income gap; then at the second distribution stage, the government should put more efforts on adjusting income distribution." This instructive principle shows our government's concern with social fairness, but the author thinks that we should be not only concern with efficiency but also with fairness at the first distribution period, because it's difficult to realize efficiency if there exists unfair system arrangement.The main aim of this paper is to take fairness and efficiency as comprehensive index to analyze the institutional performance, to discuss how to combine efficiency with fairness so as to adjust the interests' relationship, thereby realizing the reform goal of constructing overall harmonious society finally.Firstly, this paper introduces some different theories about the essence and performance of institutional change, these theories including Marxism Institutional Economics(MIE), New Institutional Economics(NIE) based on Coase tradition, Old Institutional Economics(OIE) based on Commons tradition, and Transitional Economics of China (TEC) . From studying of the above theories, the author finds that their research on institutional change are either confined to macro analyze or to cost-income analyze, or limit to interests confliction. All of their theory lay special stress on efficiency and ignore fairness. Therefore, this paper sets forth a new view point which is different from the above studies.Secondly, based on reform practice, this paper lists both the achievementsand contradictions of our market-oriented reform according to demonstrated investigation, meanwhile points out that the origin of these contradictions lies in the unfair system arrangement which also is an important factor in obstructing reform efficiency from improving.At last, in principle of taking different measures to solve different problems, and in accordance with the above problems, this paper puts forward some policy suggestions to relax these social contradictions.