新葡京官方

讲座题目：A Theory of Opium as the Cause of the Great Divergence

主讲人：万军民 日本福冈大学教授

讲座时间：2025年3月7日14:00-15:30

讲座地点：中国人民大学明德主楼734

主讲人简介：

万军民，日本福冈大学经济学教授、博士生导师，2024年8月至2025年8月为北京大学新结构经济学研究院客座教授。他的研究领域涵盖宏观经济学、金融学和发展经济学。他出版了根据其博士论文改编的关于成瘾的专著，并在国际期刊（如Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, Journal of Housing Economics, The World Economy, International Review of Economic and Finance, Review of Development Economics, Journal of Japanese and International Economies等）上发表了 20 多篇文章，内容涉及泡沫溢价、时间约束的理性泡沫理论、投机储蓄理论、家庭过度负债、固定投资有效年限、企业过度投资、商业银行不良贷款等。曾担任瑞士国家科学基金会和二十多家国际期刊的审稿人。在加入福冈大学之前，他曾在大阪大学担任助理教授。他于大阪大学获得经济学博士学位、硕士学位和学士学位。

讲座简介：

The dramatic economic expansion of the British Empire compared with the tragical declining of the Qing Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries has been called the Great Divergence, while there is no consensus on its cause. It is found here that, for over one hundred years, the smuggling and the forced imports of opium from the British Empire to the Qing Empire had exceeded the state revenues of the Qing Empire. To capture this historical fact, we present a theory of opium intake in a dynamic framework after empirically confirming its explosiveness, then we incorporate it into (a)symmetric two countries’ endogenous growth model. It is proved that opium serves to transfer the savings from one country to the other one so that the abnormal growth of one country accompanies the shrinkage of the other one. The opium intake was considered as a market failure, so the Qing Empire prohibited it by law after 1729, while the state capacity was not enough to execute the law. Therefore, the Great Divergence could be due to the cunning use of opium by Britain Empire and the incompetent Qing Empire. We also provide new insight on why there was rare capital in the Qing Empire, and on why the efficient market and facilitating state argued by Lin, Justin Yifu (2011) is indispensable for economic development.