Probe For The Harmony Between Equality And Efficiency

This paper takes Arthur Okun's wealfare economic thought as its main body, firstly, it analyzes Okun's thought about the harmony between equality and efficiency. On the one hand, the article analyzes the sequence with efficiency from equality of rights, income equality and equality of opportunity. Among these, equality of rights is prior to efficiency absolutely, because it prososes the security which ensures the freedom to participate and the fair competition, there are two kinds of relationship between income equality and efficiency meantime, one is the shift relation and the other is a mutually reinforcing relationship,and the relationship between opportunity equality and efficiency is complementary; on the other hand, the article summarizes the essence about the tradeoff between equality and efficiency, that is the relationship between income equality and efficiency, and then the article elaborates the relationship between equality, efficiency with social security; thirdly, the article introduces Okun's methods to coorderate quality and efficiency, including negative income tax policy, limited wage subsidy policy, the workers share the profits policy, increasing state spending on education policy and so on; lastly the article puts forward the contradiction between equality and efficiency though their coordination and gives more in-depth analysis using Okun's bucket and Laffer curve.This article also makes a preliminary comment and application analysis about Okun's thought of the harmony between equality and efficiency. In this section, the article refines the features of Okun's thought, analyzed the thought's features such as all-around, balance and dynamic balance firstly. Then the artical analyzes the end of Okun's thought, analyzes the significance to the development of wealfare economics and to the improvement of social wealfare. Last but not the least, the article associates Okun's thought with social security, deduces the universality of market mechanism and the unequal distribution of income and the necessity of social security for the better development of economic and social security from the indivisibility between equality and efficiency.Finally the article associates Okun's thought with the development of China's social security system. I divide China's social security development into three stages, from the founding to reform and opening up, from reform and opening up to 16th party congress, from 16th party congress to nowadays, and then the article analyzes the feature of China's social security policies in different stages, discusses the reference of Okun's thought to China's social security development.At frist, the article talks about equality and efficiency between social security and economic development, it gets the conclusion that we should develop social security with the priciple of equality and the concept of justice, it also proposes dialectical thinking that the level of social security should be consistent with the level of socio-economic development. Second, the article also puts forward strategies in order to coorderate equality and efficiency in the construction of social security itself, such as expanding the coverage of social security, unifying social security system, promoting free movement of labor, improving human resource efficiency, increasing operating income of social security funds and so on.