主题：【讨论】陈志武教授本人对<能力不足还是别有用心>的回应 -- pxpxpx

近来河友德斯蒙的一篇 能力不足还是别有用心——评陈志武教授的《我们的政府有多大》在河里反响很大。

本人虽然不是财经专业，但是对这个话题很感兴趣，同时很想知道事实到底如何。在眼看这个话题日渐被砖头埋没之前，本人冒昧给原文作者陈志武教授发了封电子邮件，并附上了河友德斯蒙的原文。

感谢陈志武教授的热心，在两个小时的时间里给了回复，现将所有的往来电子邮件列在下面，也请感兴趣的朋友积极讨论，同时也请参加讨论的河友拿出专业的精神，人身攻击还是不要的好。

Email 1

Dr. Chen:

I am personally interested in Economy and Finance of China.

About one week ago, I occasionally read a post on one of the most influential Chinese forum ccthere.com saying that your latest article regarding Chinese government expense, especially in comparison to US, has some fundamental flaws, especially on the data analysis level. I am not an expert. But even I can see how obvious they are if the accusations in the post are true.

I understand that you must be really busy and probably won't have time to reply an email from nobody and nowhere. But I'd really appreciate it if you can share some of your thoughts so that people won't waste their time in the meaningless arguments.

I really appreciate your time and wish you the best.

PX

The link to the post is

http://www.ccthere.com/article/1765360

please see the contents below:

此处略去河友德斯蒙的原文。

Email ２：

Sorry, I don't know your name or background.

About the data, it is true that I made a mistake by not realizing that the US data I used is for the Federal government, whereas the China data is for all levels of government. But, the person who wrote the comment you forwarded did not want to pay attention to the fundamental differences between China and the US. When I wrote my article, I only used the officially published data on the Budgetary Revenue (Yu Suan Nei Shou Ru), as a point of discussion. I mentioned this in my article, because this officially known revenue number is really a small fraction of the Chinese government's total income. Note the following:

1. In the U.S., the governments at all levels do not own factories or assets (less than 1% of GDP), so the tax revenues are pretty much the only revenues for them. On the other hand, China's government has four sources of income: official Budgetary Revnue (taxes and fees), extra-budgetary revenues, profits of state-owned enterprises (such as PetroChina, Bank of China and so on), and value increases in state-owned enterprise shares and state-owned land and collectively-owned land. Therefore, the 5.1 trillion Yuan Budgetary Revenue in 2007 was only a fraction of the actual income total for the government of all levels. See http://yulechengbao.bbs.cctv.com/redirect.php?tid=326976&goto=lastpost for a summary of some of these aspects. You can also search on the internet for Yu Suan Wai Shou Ru.

As an example, last year, the total profits of the 150 Central Government SOEs were about 1.5 trillion Yuan. No body knows exactly how much the governments of all levels received from selling state-owned land for real estate development and from selling state-owned enterprises. At one point when PetroChina's A-shares were listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the total market value of PetroChina alone was more than US$1 trillion. Such wealth owned by the state and capital gains from such state asset ownership are all at the Chinese government's disposal. With such vast wealth owned by the state and not privatized or owned by the people, why should the government raise any taxes at all, in order to provide welfare benefits to the people?

Without any published data about such Yu Suan Wai income amounts, it is difficult to get any exact number for how much actual income the Chinese government really received in 2007. Therefore, I had to make assumptions about how much the productive assets owned by the state should have risen in value in relation to the GDP growth rate, which gave me a total of 15.7 trillion Yuan for China's governmenal income (including taxes, fees, SOE profits, SOE asset value gains, and state-owned land value gains). But, that is just a rough estimate. So, I chose to focus only on the published official number for the Budgetary Revenue (or, Yu Suan Nei Shou Ru, or revenues within the fiscal plan).

2. The sad thing is that China started nationalization of land and enterprises in the 1950's, with the official goal of spreading and sharing wealth among the people and managing the economy for the people, but the reality is that the government in China has spent less as a percentage of government revenues (even when we use just the 5.1 trillion Yuan as the basis) on items related to people's lives, than in the U.S. All the state-owned assets have not done much to boost people's welfare., which is part of the reason why the SOEs should be privatized.

3. The person who wrote the comment below says in his Point 5 that asset value appreciation of state-owned enterprises and state-owned land is not spendable or disposable income. That is a lack of basic understanding of economics. He says ＂难道因为我的房子今年增值了10万元，就说我今年的可支配收入是10万以上么？＂（此处及下面中文在陈教授电子邮件里是乱码，现在的内容是根据乱码里的数字和上下文猜测的）. Yes, of course, you can. You can either sell the house to realize the gain or borrow a home equity loan to cash out part of the gain and then spend, which means that you can spend the gain (but it does not mean you will need to spend it). The point is that you can spend it if you really want to. ＂那么明年房子跌价了20万元，难道可支配收入就变成负值了？＂. The same logic in the opposite direction. Yes. The fact that the Chinese government did not need to take in the 1.5 trillion Yuan of SOE profits last year and did not need to sell much of the SOE shares or state-owned land suggests that the government had too much tax income already, so it did not need to use the capital gains.

The minor differences in other data points are due to different sources of data and to the fact that it usually takes several rounds of revision for government statistical bureaus (both in the US and China) to modify and finalize macro-economic numbers. So, depending on which version you use, you can get different numbers. Because of time shortage, I don't want to go through each of them here. But the basic conclusions are the same as in my article: that is, China's government has taken in much taxes and fees in addition to state-owned assets and other productive wealth, but has not done much for its people, not even as much as governments in totally privately-owned economies.

Thank you for your pointing out this comment. I had known about it before, but thought that readers could see what the basic picture and message is. As to the personal attacks on me, I don't really care.

Chen Zhiwu

Email 3

Dr. Chen:

As I said in my previous email, I do appreciate your response.

In addition, I am wondering if you would allow me to post your comments (in English only without translation) to ccthere so that other people can see as well. Based on my experience, many users of this forum are mid-age professionals who are living overseas. So I believe that your comments will definitely spark some very serious thinking and deeper discussions.

Please note that my pen name in this forum is pxpxpx and I didn't attend the current discussion at all. The only reason that I sent you this email was that I don't like to see any naive, ignorant and even hatred comments on such a serious topic. It's just simply not healthy.

Your response encouraged me to go deeper in this field and make me feel that there are always hope and potentials in our country that are bigger than anyone could ever imagine.

Good work professor!

Thanks

Px

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