An Uneasy Marriage: Government and Markets
●Stephen Haber, Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, “The Poverty Trap”（Hoover Digest 2002 No. 4）
The necessary connection between government and the market creates a thorny problem. Government is crucial because it enforces contract and property rights. Yet any government that is strong enough to enforce property rights is also strong enough to abrogate them for its own benefit, either by outright expropriation or by taxing away all of the income produced by private property. Governments, in fact, have powerful incentives to do this.
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The fundamental problem of economic development is therefore devising the appropriate means for channeling government action to support rather than predate on markets.
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Vibrant markets require government, but not just any government will do. There must be institutions that limit the government from predating on the market. Solving the development problem therefore requires crafting political institutions that limit the discretion and authority of government and of individual actors within the government. That necessarily requires institutions that protect individual liberty. As Friedrich Hayek, one of the foremost students of liberty, observed, “There is only one such principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.”
The problem in the developing world is thus as much a problem of governance as it is of economic policies that support markets. Indeed, the fundamental problem in the developing world is not that there is no protection of property rights; it is that the government may protect the property rights of some people while simultaneously abrogating or reducing the property rights of others. Too often governments in developing countries arbitrarily reallocate the property rights of some individuals to other individuals who happen to be in the governments’ good graces. Governments may also craft economic policies in such a way as to increase the property rights of that select group (for example, by giving them tax exemptions or awarding them special concessions to exploit public resources).
Limited government is therefore necessary for economic development. But the question of how to do it is a thorny one.
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No simple recipe for limiting government exists. Yet two principles are clear. First, a country must create mechanisms and incentives for different branches and levels of government to impose sanctions on one another if they exceed the authority granted to them by the law. Second, these sanctions cannot be imposed in an arbitrary or ad hoc fashion: The sanction mechanisms themselves must be limited by the law. This is not to say that the sanctions cannot be harsh (indeed, if they are not harsh they are not credible sanctions).
There are essentially two ways to create these sanction mechanisms and incentives. One is a system of checks and balances that limits a strong central government. In a system like this, political competition among actors in the different branches of government provides incentives for actors to police one another’s actions. France is a good example of this kind of system.
A second way to limit government is federalism, in which different levels of government limit one another. Here the incentives to police the actions of other government actors come from the self-interest of each level of government.
