On Thu, 14 Apr 1994, Paul Bowles wrote:
> My
> reading on the subject indicates that there is in fact a wide variation
> in the way that collective ownership rights are exercised. In some cases
> it does appear though that the township and village governments which own
> them do finance an array of social services from the profits of TVEs and
> that employment practices sometimes involve hiring one member from each
> household in order to equalise household incomes. In other cases, TVEs
> appear to be no more than private ents in disguise. What the balance is
> between these two extremes is seems impossible to tell at this point.
> However, it seems to me that TVEs do represent something different and
> indeed this has puzzled many neoclassical economists who have argued that
> well defined private property rights are needed for efficiency and
> growth; the Chinese TVE sector provides one example where this is not
> true but where economic success has been accompanied by vaguely defined
> collective ownership.
Pardon my ignorance here (I know next to nothing about China), but are
there any studies discussing the effects of ownership styles (e.g.,
percentage of indigenous capital, management structures, distribution of
earnings across households) on productivity or even output per village?
If not it seems some serious and difficult quantitative studies
with some intital confused, haphazard regressions would be in order
before one could make any real definitive statements about TVEs as
representing a possibility opened up by this or that mode of production
-- otherwise we're just a bunch of blind folks looking at a moving
elephant, trying to figure out if it has a V-6 or a V-8.
Just wondering,
Tavis
