正式法律及其执行对于中国经济发展所起的作用仍被低估。一个小型但却有一定代表性的经验调查结果显示,在合同的执行方面,中国的法院比行业协会(或同业公会)更有效率。在中国巨大的、充满活力的转型经济体制下,对商事公司而言,正式的合同机制在保护合同预期以及解决争端方面有比较明显的比较优势。通过利用正式法律制度的供求分析框架,在一定程度上修正了既有文献中的错误观念——在过去的三十年间,中国的正式法律对它的经济发展未起到重要作用。 The role of formal law and its enforcement in China's economic development remains underestimated. A small but representative survey of empirical findings shows that courts in China are more efficient than trade associations (or guilds) in the performance of contracts. Under China's huge and dynamic transitional economy, for commercial companies, the formal contractual mechanism has obvious comparative advantages in protecting contractual expectations and settling disputes. By using the formal legal system of supply and demand analysis framework, to a certain extent, the mistaken ideas in the existing literature have been amended. For the past three decades, the formal law in China has not played an important role in its economic development.