China’s Painful Structural Transformation

SHANGHAI – For more than a year, headlines from worldwide have been pointing to a Chinese economic slowdown. But a closer observation at regional dynamics within China tells a different story – one that China‘s economy is less about deceleration than changing gears.

一年多来，全球经济新闻头条纷纷指向中国经济放缓。但近观国内区域经济的增长动态，看到的东西会有所不同——与其说中国经济处于减速期，不如说处于换挡期。

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the resource-rich province of Shanxi has suffered an economic slowdown, but the southwestern provinces like Guizhou and Chongqing have experienced vibrant growth. Hebei and three other northeastern provinces are struggling with the effects of recession, but the heavy-industry supported cities as Tianjin, Shandong, and Jiangsu are booming.

根据中国国家统计局公布的资料，资源丰富的山西省遭遇了经济下滑，但是位于西南部的重庆市和贵州省的经济却增长迅速，生机勃勃。同时，河北省和其他东北三省正在经历经济衰退带来的不良后果，而同样曾是重工业主导的天津市、山东省和江苏省的经济却保持蓬勃发展势头。

After the 2008 financial crisis, when slower growth became the “new normal” for many countries, China began to accelerate its economic rebalancing by shifting the drivers of growth from manufacturing and exports toward goods and services for domestic consumption.

2008年全球金融危机后，经济增长放缓已成为许多国家的“新常态”， 中国也开始加快经济的再平衡，由原来的制造业和出口转向主要用于国内消费的产品的生产与服务的提供。

This transition has brought far-reaching implications for the future dynamics of China’s economy. With its previous export strategy, the government’s main priority was to integrate domestic manufacturing operations into global production chains. Now, however, its aim is to reach an economy that meets domestic consumers’ diverse demands, and it is the industries closely connected to those demands that are quickly expanding.

这一转变给中国未来的经济增长动力带来了深远影响。以前的出口战略中，政府优先考虑的是将国内制造业与全球生产链进行整合。如今的目标则变为满足多样的国内消费需求，并且正是与这些需求紧密相关的产业正在迅猛发展。

Previously, the economic activities that are now flourishing weren’t categorized as manufacturing industries at all, but as “services.” But services do not exist in a vacuum. All businesses need manufactured products, transportation, information and communications technology (ICT), logistics, real estate, finance, insurance, and more. Thus, new demand for new services has virtuous-cycle effects in terms of capital investment in infrastructure and equipment. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the growth of services in China to meet domestic demand does not mean the end of manufacturing and capital investment, much less of the economic growth.

现今繁荣的这些经济活动长期以来是被归入服务业，而非制造业的，但是服务业并不意味着脱离实际，与世隔绝。所有的商业活动都需要制造、运输、信息和通信技术、物流、地产、金融、保险等行业配套。因此，对于新服务的新需求会对基础设施投资和设备投资产生良性循环的效果。不同于传统智慧，服务业的日益增长是为了满足国内消费需求，并不意味着制造业和资本投资的末日，更不意味着经济增长走到尽头。

Service sectors stand to make up for much, if not all, of the growth lost to lower output in export-oriented manufacturing branches. China’s transportation, ICT, finance, insurance, real estate, education, and health-care sectors have long had inappropriately low labor productivity, which means they have significant space to grow faster.

即便不能完全弥补，服务业也在努力更多地弥补由出口导向型制造业产出降低导致的增长失速。中国在运输、信息和通信技术、金融、保险、地产、教育、健康等行业的劳动生产率长期以来并不高，反倒证明这些行业有着重要的快速增长空间。

According to a paper by the economists Jong-Wha Lee and Warwick J. McKibbin, service-sector productivity growth in Asia “benefits all sectors eventually, and contributes to the sustained and balanced growth of Asian economies.” Examining economic development trends in South Korea, the authors find that the average value added per worker in transportation, real estate, and ICT is now higher than the average in manufacturing, and they point to similar dynamics in the United States, Japan, and China.

经济学家Jong-Wha Lee 和Warwick J. McKibbin在一篇论文中指出，亚洲的服务业生产率增长将“最终使所有行业受益，并有助于亚洲经济体持续、平衡的增长。” 以韩国的经济发展情况为鉴，他们发现运输、地产和信息和通信技术行业的人均附加值要高于制造业的平均值，同时指出在美国、日本和中国也如此。

This finding suggests that rapid development in China’s service economy could reverse the externally triggered dampening of growth since 2008. But, as the Japanese and South Korean transitions from export to domestic demand-driven growth demonstrate, structural transformation is a slow and painful process.

这一发现表明中国服务经济的迅猛发展能够逆转2008年以来由外部冲击造成的不景气。然而从日本和韩国从出口转向国内需求导向的增长经验来看，结构转型是一个缓慢而痛苦的过程。

China is in the midst of that process, and it must be careful not to undermine existing sources of growth lest it fall into a structural trap where the cost of transition itself derails new gains. It is not a good sign that the high costs in many Chinese provinces have been weighing down overall growth.

中国正处于结构转型中，必须警惕避免经济增长对既存增长源泉的削弱，以免掉入结构性陷阱造成结构转型成本过高，抵消转型的好处。而中国多省出现的转型成本高昂拖累了总体的经济增长趋势，这并不是一个好征兆。

This points to fundamental challenges ahead, notwithstanding the significant economic potential of Chinese consumers. For starters, economic development based on diversified domestic demand is more complicated than export-driven development, because these new sectors rely more heavily on sophisticated financial services, free and equitable market access, better educated workers, and higher investment in research and development.

尽管中国消费者的规模潜力相当巨大，但是上述情况还是指出了发展前路上面临的基本挑战。对于新手而言，基于国内需求多元化的经济增长相较于出口导向型发展更为复杂，因为这些新行业的发展更多倚重于复杂的金融服务、自由公平的市场准入资格、受教育程度更高的劳动者以及对研究开发领域更多的投资。

As a result, the new businesses emerging from the shift to a new growth model are demanding far more from China’s current economic-governance system than it can bear. Further structural reforms would go a long way toward fixing this problem, but they will also require China’s leaders to make tough political decisions that won’t please everyone.

因此，转向新增长模型的新业态对中国现存经济治理体系提出远超出其所能承载的要求。为解决这些问题，中国的进一步结构性改革还有很长的路要走，即使不会皆大欢喜，这依然要求中国领导人要做出艰难的政治决定。

Another fundamental challenge is China’s slow rate of urbanization, which is still lagging, even after 25 years of export-led growth. Each of a thriving service economy’s major components – ICT, finance, insurance, transportation, and real estate – needs the others to prosper, and cities are what bring them all together – a phenomenon of network externalities. Unfortunately, China’s enduring system of dividing urban and rural regions, together with poor urban planning, has led to fragmented and scattered metropolitan communities without diversified networks that would otherwise have helped boost productivity.

另一项根本挑战是中国的低城市化率，尽管经历了25年的出口拉动型增长，城市化进程依旧步履蹒跚。信息和通信技术、金融、保险、运输、地产，繁荣的服务型经济中每一项主要要素都离不开其他要素的繁荣，而正是城市将这些要素聚拢，即所谓的网络关联外部性现象。不幸的是，中国长期的城乡二元结构体制与不合理的城市规划，已经导致大城市社区碎片化、分散化并缺乏多样化的城市网群，不然大城市社区本应能促进生产率更大的提高。

China’s cities will be a key ingredient of its long-term economic success. Urbanization should start accelerating today, and over the next 10-15 years, with the expansion of metropolitan areas geared toward the needs of services-led economic growth. If China can rise to that challenge, it will be well positioned to clear the remaining hurdles in its path toward high-income status.

城市将成为中国经济长期成功发展的核心要素。城市化应当从现在开始提速，并且未来10到15年间城市规模应当配合服务拉动型经济增长而进行扩张。如果中国能够跨越这个挑战，将更有利于为迈向高收入国家扫清现存障碍。

英文原文China’s Painful Structural Transformation

于2016年8月19日发表于Project Syndiacate

专业指导：张军教授、叶慧超博士候选人

翻译：姚思文 校对：夏梦