演講者簡介 : 萬又煊教授為Ph.D. in Economics，Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1961)。現為美國康乃爾大學經濟系教授。其主要研究領域為Development under Globalization、The economics of East Asia、Welfare Economics of International Trade、Industrial Policy。
演講摘要 : Developing countries often find it difficult to start a socially desirable industry, in which the entry of one firm may benefit another. The conventional wisdom may regard this as the classical decreasing cost industry of Marshall, where firms interact instantaneously and symmetrically. In those economies that manage to take off, initial restriction on entry often becomes relaxed gradually, inviting the interpretation that in correcting past intervention with current liberalization, it is the vested interest that slows down the progress. The time profile of relaxing restrictions is viewed as a meaningful index of the economic performance, and the optimal program presumably should end in free entry. We show that all these perceptions can be totally wrong, and in the documented economic history of Japan, these are definitely false. The initial difficulty was due to the prospective free riding on the pioneer, and the gradual relaxing of entry constraint is exactly the optimal, feasible policy. For a constructed example, the algorithmic proof of the existence and non-uniqueness of the optimal solution demonstrates that equally optimal paths can coexist, ending with either free entry or perpetual oligopoly.
