중상주의(신중상주의) 정책의 지대추구 측면에 관한 연구

Abstract

Today we are witnessing a rampant rise of nee-mercantilist policies, such as new technology-based industrial development policies and the formation of regional blocs, which differ in their manifestations but share the same ideas and predilections with old mercantilist policies in the 17-18th centuries. The lack of criticism against and concern, among academic circles, about the return, in far more sophisticated forms, of mercantilism, which had long been proven as pre-scientific and pre-analytic, is a shame, although a group of rent-seeking theorists and institutionalist scholars have recently begun to open fire against the old mercantilism, describing it as a rent-seeking society. Finding that the true concept of national wealth established by Adam Smith has failed to play its deserved role persistently in the controversy over the nature of (neo- )mercantilist policies, this article puts forward a set of hypothesis in an attempt to improve the power of the rent-seeking explanations. The hypotheses prove reinforcing the validity of rent-seeking explanation of mercantilist policies, while providing only indeterminate conclusion, yet new problems and research themes, for neo-mercantilist policies. This study concludes with the remark that we need" to reread The Wealth of Nations, in which Smith expounded so forcibly the true nature and the causes of national wealth and condemned so strongly the mercantile system not only for its scientific falsity, but more importantly for its immorality and injustice.