演講者簡介 : Jiahua Che got his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 1996. He is currently serving as Associate Professor of Department of Economics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research field is in comparative institutional analysis, China’s economy and political economy, theory of the firm, and development economics.
演講摘要 : We compare autocracy and democracy from the aspect of political selection rather than that of political incentives. The aim of our study is to understand how the long-term performance of autocracy is compared to that of democracy when autocracy permits no checks and balance or political competition. Our study focuses on one key difference between autocracy and democracy. That is, in autocracy, incumbent leader selects the future leader, whereas in democracy, the future leader is chosen by citizens per majority rule. From this single difference, a rich set of implications is derived. We show that the performances of all democracies (i.e., different economies under the democratic institution) tend to converge, whereas those of autocracies tend to diverge. Some autocracies dominate democracy, while some fare much worse, with others falling in between. However, even when it outperforms democracy, autocracy tends to be volatile; and moreover, bad autocracies may deliver similar short-term outstanding performance as good autocracies do.
