商业无边界——反垄断法的经济学革命
—— 亨利·曼尼(Henry
乔治·梅森大学法学院荣休院长
作者:薛兆丰
策划编辑:陈斌
责任编辑:韩满春
出版社:法律出版社
出版日期:2008年11月1日
ISBN:978-7-5036-8782-2
发行:中国法律图书有限公司
销售:全国新华书店及网络书店
定价:20.00元网上购买请点击这里在“当当书店”以85%折优惠价购买
请点击这里在“中国图书网”以85%折优惠价购买
作者简介
薛兆丰,经济学者,美国西北大学法学院(Northwestern University School ofLaw)博士后研究员,北京大学“法律经济学研究中心”研究员,美国乔治·梅森大学(George MasonUniversity)经济学博士。曾在梅森大学讲授“法与经济学”课程,并在国内发表过数百篇经济评论和文章,持续影响了读者对市场经济的认识。2002年出版《经济学的争议》,2006 年被《南方人物周刊》评为中国十大青年领袖。
序言
亨利·曼尼(Henry G. Manne)*
乔治·梅森大学法学院荣休院长
Foreword by Henry G. Manne
Dr. Zhaofeng Xue has written a book of enormous value to theChinese economy. It is, in a word, a guidebook to the many trapsand fallacies of American-style (and, even more, European-style)antitrust law that is being adopted willy-nilly in many countries.One cannot read or peruse this monograph without becomingcompletely puzzled about how such a plethora of errors could existin this era of scientific economics and startled by theattractiveness of this muddle for other countries.
Dr. Xue’s first task then is to demonstrate why such phenomenaas large-scale firms, resale price maintenance, verticalintegration, below-cost pricing, price discrimination and manykinds of mergers are pro-competitive, economically beneficialpractices. The strong economic logic which now explains thesebenefits was not, however, always understood. American antitrustlaws date from 1890, while many of the convincing explanations Dr.Xue offers were not developed in the economics literature until thesecond-half of the 20th Century. And while American courts have forsome years now reshaped antitrust law to reflect this newerunderstanding, other nations’ courts and regulators seem to want tostop the intellectual clock at about 1950, the highpoint offallacious antitrust reasoning.
So even though the idea of competitive markets as maximizingsocial welfare has made significant inroads on political andeconomic thinking everywhere in recent decades, anachronisticantitrust thinking prevails in the very countries that allegedlywant to adopt the best of market economics. Dr. Xue’s explanationof this phenomenon is reflective of the best in interdisciplinarythinking about economic problems.
The first and often oversimplified part of this explanation hasto do with economic literacy. The policy makers (and theiraudiences) simply do not really understand what they are doing,since, if they did, they would be more enamored of post-1950American antitrust jurisprudence than they are with pre-1950 ideas.To elaborate the significance of the newer learning, Dr. Xuedetails the development of the field known in American law schoolsas “Law and Economics,” an intellectual advancement of majorsignificance. This area of study has not only influenced lawprofessors and economists, it has had a profound influence on thejudges in America’s federal courts, the locus of most antitrustjurisprudence. The importance of active educational programs forpolicy makers cannot be overemphasized, for without thisunderstanding, there can be no profound improvement in theantitrust picture.
But the argument from ignorance has a major flaw; it cannotexplain why this particular form of economic foolishness wasselected over all the others that are available to politicians andregulators. And so Dr. Xue makes an incursion into an area rarelydiscussed in antitrust circles but absolutely crucial to anunderstanding of what is going on in many parts of the antitrustworld, the field of public choice theory. This subject, the“economics analysis of political behavior,” is, in its moreformalized and integrated form, also of recent vintage. Now, usingthe kinds of tools of economic analysis that fathered the modernantitrust understanding in America, we can begin to understand howthe interests of politicians and regulators may logically (but notsocially desirably) tend them in the direction of old-styleantitrust.
This book will lift a veil off the readers’ eyes, as it becomesperfectly understandable how mistakes were originally made and whythey persist in some parts of the world today. No one can comethrough this exercise without expressing strong doubts aboutwhether antitrust is socially desirable. But if, for reasons oftheir own, policy makers persist in this nonsense, at least we knowwhat to do to ameliorate the worst effects of their decisions.
Henry G. Manne
Dean Emeritus
George Mason University School of Law
评论