政治與經濟間的交錯：政治景氣循環理論的發展評析

Abstract

政治發展與經濟表現間的互動關係同時是學界與實務界關注的焦點，政治景氣循環（Political Business Cycle）的概念也因此應運而生，並逐漸發展成一系統化的理論。本文首先詳細介紹傳統政治景氣循環理論中，投機派及黨性派兩大不同流派的思維，並納入新古典學派理性預期的架構。此外，本文並針對晚近政治景氣循環研究的方向，歸納出三個發展的趨勢：其一是不再拘泥特定的總體經濟指標，改由政策工具的角度出發，觀察政府政策是否存在預算或貨幣循環的現象；其二，鑑於政治景氣循環的現象不非明顯可見，研究思路由詮釋循環現象為何會產生，轉為探討不會發生的特定理由；其三，隨著統計資料的逐漸完備，學界觀察觸角延伸遍及新興民主國家、後共產主義國家、甚至是非民主國家，研究範圍因而得以擴大，除豐富了政治景氣循環理論的內容，更賦予其跨國比較研究的意涵。

The relationship between politics and economy has been important to the practical and academic. For that, the Political Business Cycle Theory is developed to explain the manner and has become an organized research framework. This paper tries to introduce this theory in details, not only the viewpoints of the traditional opportunistic and partisan approaches, but also the perspective of New Classical rational expectations. In addition, this paper concludes three directions that empirical political business cycle research is aiming. First, research about political business cycle is no more limited in the discussion of economic indexes, they also focus on the policy instruments and observe the phenomena of budget and monetary cycles. Second, since the cycle is not appearing all the time, research starts to change their focal point from why to why not happening. Finally, with the availability of statistics data, researchers start to observe the political business cycle in some newly developing countries, post-communism countries, and non-democratic countries.