政府规模是一个重要的宏观经济变量,也是一个引人关注的跨学科研究领域。其中,地方政府因处在公共服务供给的最前沿而使其规模问题备受关注。最近几十年来,许多地区由人口减少导致的财政困难引发了各种改革计划,规模经济以及人们的直觉常常被作为改革的基础逻辑,追求最优政府规模则成为改革的潜在目标。政府规模所处的政策供给市场具有复杂的变量关系结构,人口规模只是政策供给端的潜在影响因素之一,而有关最优政府规模的讨论往往只是相对于经济增长展开的。政府规模是一个关系概念并具有动态性特征,其测度也表明了这一特征。随着危机管理、风险管理日益成为国家治理的常态,政府规模似乎也获得了越来越重要的杠杆功能。最优政府规模虽在现实中难以实现,但代表着一种平衡的理念,很大程度上可抑制有关政府规模的极化思考并有助于约束政府行为,同时也提示了不同政府规模应对现实问题的不同潜力。

Government size is an important macroeconomic variable and a multi-disciplinary field of interest. The issue of local government size has attracted enormous attention because local governments are always at the forefront of public service delivery. Over the past few decades, many local governments have been struggling with financial sustainability due to depopulation, leading to various reform programs under the intuitive logic of scale economies, and pursuing the optimal government size seems the potential reform target. The paper contends that in the complicated spectrum of variable relations in the policy provision market, population size is merely one of the plausible influencing factors on government size, and the “optimality” discussed in the literature is mostly in terms of economic growth. The commonly used measures of government size also suggest that it is a relational and dynamic notion. With crisis and risk management growing into a normalcy of state governance, government size seems to have gained an increasingly important leverage function. Though the optimal government size may be infeasible in the real world, it represents an idea of balance, which can restrain polarized thinking about government size and discipline government behavior. It also suggests that different government sizes may have varied potentialities to address practical problems.