二百一十年前,古典政治经济学的杰出创立者亚当·斯密发表了其在学说史上具有重大影响的经济学论著《国民财富的性质和原因的研究》(以下简称《国富论》)。在这部著作中,斯密从分析分工开始,进而研究交换和作为交换媒介的货币等一系列资本主义经济范畴,并在此基础上建立了政治经济学的理论结构。正是由于劳动分工学说在斯密的经济理论体系中占有重要的地位,所以它成为人们研究《国富论》的重点之一。然而笔者感到,我们以往对这一专题的研究,仅停留在分工能提高劳动生产率的一般化论述上,尚未涉及其中所蕴含着的丰富的“规模收益”思想。有鉴于此,本文试图就这方面进行粗略的探讨。 Two hundred and ten years ago, Adam Smith, an outstanding founder of classical political economy, published his study on the Nature and Causes of National Wealth (hereinafter referred to as “Wealth of Nations”), an economist influential in the history of the theory. . In this book, Smith begins with the analysis of division of labor, and then studies a series of capitalist economic categories, such as exchange and currency as a medium of exchange. On this basis, Smith establishes the theoretical structure of political economy. It is precisely because the theory of division of labor occupies an important position in Smith's economic theory system, so it becomes one of the focuses of people's study of “Wealth of Nations”. However, I feel that our previous research on this topic only stayed on the general discussion on the division of labor and raised the productivity of labor, and did not yet address the rich “scale returns” thought contained therein. In view of this, this article attempts to conduct a rough discussion on this aspect.