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【来源】英国《经济学家》
【链接】http://www.economist.com/opinion ... m?story_id=12773135
【标题】China and India Suddenly vulnerable
【正文】
Asia’s two big beasts are shivering. India’s economy is weaker, but China’s leaders have more to fear
THE speed with which clouds of economic gloom and even despair have gathered over the global economy has been startling everywhere. But the change has been especially sudden in the world’s two most populous countries: China and India. Until quite recently, the world’s fastest-growing big economies both felt themselves largely immune from the contagion afflicting the rich world. Optimists even hoped that these huge emerging markets might provide the engines that could pull the world out of recession. Now some fear the reverse: that the global downturn is going to drag China and India down with it, bringing massive unemployment to two countries that are, for all their success, still poor—India is home to some two-fifths of the world’s malnourished children.
The pessimism may be overdone. These are still the most dynamic parts of the world economy. But both countries face daunting economic and political difficulties. In India’s case, its newly positive self-image has suffered a double blow: from the economic buffeting, and from the bullets of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last month. As our special report makes clear, India’s recent self-confidence had two roots. One was a sustained spurt in economic growth to a five-year annual average of 8.8%. The other was the concomitant rise in India’s global stature and influence. No longer, its politicians gloated, was India “hyphenated” with Pakistan as one half of a potential nuclear maelstrom. Rather it had become part of “Chindia”—a fast-growing success story.
The Mumbai attacks, blamed on terrorist groups based in Pakistan and bringing calls for punitive military action, have revived fears of regional conflict. A hyphen has reappeared over India’s western border, just as the scale of the economic setback hitting India is becoming apparent. Exports in October fell by 12% compared with the same month last year; hundreds of small textile firms have gone out of business; even some of the stars of Indian manufacturing of recent years, in the automotive industry, have suspended production. The central bank has revised its estimate of economic growth this year downwards, to 7.5-8%, which is still optimistic. Next year the rate may well fall to 5.5% or less, the lowest since 2002.
Still faster after all these yearsIf China’s growth rate were to fall to that level, it would be regarded as a disaster at home and abroad. The country is this month celebrating the 30th anniversary of the event seen as marking the launch of its policies of “reform and opening”, since when its economy has grown at an annual average of 9.8%. The event was a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee at which Deng Xiaoping gained control. Tentatively at first but with greater radicalism in the 1990s, the party dismantled most of the monolithic Maoist edifice—parcelling out collective farmland, sucking in vast amounts of foreign investment and allowing private enterprise to thrive. The anniversary may be a bogus milestone, but it is easy to understand why the party should want to trumpet the achievements of the past 30 years (see article). They have witnessed the most astonishing economic transformation in human history. In a country that is home to one-fifth of humanity some 200m people have been lifted out of poverty.
Yet in China, too, the present downturn is jangling nerves. The country is a statistical haze, but the trade figures for last month—with exports 2% lower than in November 2007 and imports 18% down—were shocking. Power generation, generally a reliable number, fell by 7%. Even though the World Bank and other forecasters still expect China’s GDP to grow by 7.5% in 2009, that is below the 8% level regarded, almost superstitiously, as essential if huge social dislocation is to be avoided. Just this month a senior party researcher gave warning of what he called, in party-speak, “a reactive situation of mass-scale social turmoil”. Indeed, demonstrations and protests, always common in China, are proliferating, as laid-off factory-workers join dispossessed farmers, environmental campaigners and victims of police harassment in taking to the streets.
The gap between mouth and trouserOne worry is that China’s rulers will try to push the yuan down to help exporters. That would be a terrible idea, not least because the government has the resources to ease the pain in less dangerous ways: it is running a budget surplus and has little debt. Last month it announced a huge 4 trillion yuan (nearly $600 billion) fiscal-stimulus package. Some who have crunched the numbers argue that this was all mouth and no trousers—much of it made up by old budget commitments, double-counting and empty promises. It was thus mainly propaganda, to convince China’s own people and the outside world that the government was serious about stimulating demand at home. That may yet prove to be unfair: what matters is when infrastructure money is spent, not when it is announced. Yet there is little sign that the regime is ready to take radical steps in the two areas that would do most to persuade the rural majority to spend its money rather than hoard it: giving farmers better rights over their land; and providing a decent social safety-net, especially in health care.
Still, China does at least have trousers, with deep pockets. India, in contrast, is not seen as a big potential part of the answer to the world’s economic problems. Not only is its economy far smaller; its government’s finances are also a mess. Its budget deficit—some 8% of GDP—inhibits it from offering a bigger stimulus that might mitigate the downturn (see article). This is alarming. If China reckons it needs 8% annual growth to provide jobs for the 7m or so new members of its workforce each year, how is India to cope? A younger country, its workforce is increasing by about 14m a year—ie, about one-quarter of the world’s new workers. And, perversely, its great successes of recent years have been in industries that rely not on vast supplies of cheap labour but on smaller numbers of highly educated engineers—such as its computer-services businesses and capital-intensive manufacturing.
In two respects, however, India has a big advantage over China in coping with an economic slowdown. It has all-too extensive experience in it; and it has a political system that can cope with disgruntlement without suffering existential doubts. India pays an economic price for its democracy. Decision-making is cumbersome. And as in China, unrest and even insurgency are widespread. But the political system has a resilience and flexibility that China’s own leaders, it seems, believe they lack. They are worrying about how to cope with protests. India’s have their eyes on a looming election.
It used to be a platitude of Western—and Marxist—analysis of China that wrenching economic change would demand political reform. Yet China’s economy boomed with little sign of any serious political liberalisation to match the economic free-for-all. The cliché fell into disuse. Indeed, many, even in democratic bastions such as India, began to fall for the Chinese Communist Party’s argument that dictatorship was good for growth, whereas Indian democracy was a luxury paid for by the poor, in the indefinite extension of their poverty.
But as China enters a trying year of anniversaries—the 50th of the suppression of an uprising in Tibet; the 20th of the quashing of the Tiananmen Square protests; the 60th of the founding of the People’s Republic itself—it may be worth remembering that the winter of 1978-79 saw not only a party Central Committee plenum but also the “Democracy Wall” movement in Beijing. It was a brief flowering of the freedom of expression, quite remarkable after the xenophobic isolation of the Cultural Revolution. Deng, like Mao Zedong before him, tolerated the dissident movement as long as it served his ends, and then stamped it out. In so doing he thwarted what Wei Jingsheng, the most famous of the wall-writers, had dubbed “the fifth modernisation”: democracy. China still needs it.
来自:http://www.economist.com/opinion ... m?story_id=12773135
参考译文:
亚洲两巨兽在颤抖。印度的经济在变弱，但中国的领导人要担心的事情更多
忧伤乃至绝望的经济阴云聚拢，其速度令人吃惊。但在世界上两个人口最多的国家：中国和印度，这种转变发生得特别突然。不久前，这两个全球发展最快的大经济体都认为自己基本上可以免疫于困扰富国的那种传染病。乐观主义者甚至希望，这些巨大的新兴市场会提供引擎，把世界拉出衰退。如今，有人担心实际情况会刚好相反：全球经济低迷将把中国和印度拖下水，造成这两个尽管成就非凡却仍然贫穷（世界上营养不良的儿童大约有五分之二在印度）的国家大量人口失业。
这种悲观主义可能太过了。它们仍然是世界经济最有活力的部分。但两国都面临令人望而却步的经济和政治困难。以印度的情况来看，它新的正面的自我形象遭受了双重打击：经济冲击以及上月的孟买袭击。印度最近的自信有两个根源。一是五年来年平均增长率8.8% 。另一个是印度全球地位和影响力的上升。它的政治家洋洋得意，印度不再是那个与巴基斯坦共同组成潜在核漩涡的印度，而是Chindia的一部分，一个快速成长的成功传奇。
然而被归咎于巴基斯坦恐怖组织的孟买袭击，引发了采取惩罚性军事行动的呼声，地区冲突的忧虑再现。
印度的经济挫折程度正变得明显。10月的出口与去年同期相比跌12%。央行已经向下修正今年的预期增长，估计为7.5%到8%。到明年，这个数字可能下降到5.5%或以下，这是自2002年最低的水平。
如果中国的增长率降至那个程度，那将被视为国内外的灾难。中国本月标志改革开放三十周年。三十年来，中国拆除了毛泽东主义大厦的大部分——分田到户，引入大量外资，允许发展私营企业，经济以9.8%年平均增长率增长。中共要宣扬过去三十年的成就，这很容易理解。他们曾见证了人类历史上最惊人的经济转变。在这个人口占世界人口五分之一的国家，大约两亿人摆脱了贫困。
然而，在中国，目前的低迷也刺激神经。这个国家在统计学上是一团迷雾，但上月的贸易数据令人震惊，出口与去年同期相比降2%，进口降18% 。发电量降7% 。尽管世界银行和其他预测家仍然估计中国明年的GDP增长可达7.5%，但这低于被近乎迷信地视为回避重大社会混乱所必须的8% 。就在本月，党内一位高级研究员发出“大规模社会动乱的被动局面”的警告。事实上，当失业的工厂工人和失地农民、环境运动家以及警察滥权的受害者一起走上街头，中国常有的示威和抗议蔓延开来。
说与做的差距 人们担心中国试图让人民币贬值以帮助出口商。那是一个可怕的想法，尤其是因为中国政府拥有资源，本可以用危险性较低的办法止痛：它有预算盈余，没有什么债务。上月，它公布庞大的4万亿元人民币的财政刺激方案。有人认为这是光说不练——这个方案中有很多是旧有的预算，重复的计算以及虚无的承诺。它主要是宣传性的，向中国人和外界表明，政府认真刺激国内消费。然而，没有什么迹象表明政府准备在两个最能说服农村人放手花钱的领域采取激进措施：给予农民更好的土地权；提供体面的社保网络，特别是医疗保障。
但是中国至少有行动，而且有很多钱。印度则相反，并没有被视为解决世界经济问题的重要部分。不仅仅是因为它的经济规模要小得多，而且因为它的政府财务一团糟。它的预算赤字约占GDP的8%，制约了它提供较大刺激以缓解低迷的能力。这令人担忧。如果中国认为它需要8%的年增长率为新增劳动力提供就业，那印度呢？印度人口更为年轻化，一年增加的新劳动力约占世界新增劳动力的四分之一。而且，它近年来的巨大成就不在于依赖大量廉价劳动力而的产业，而在于依靠人数较少的受过高等教育的工程师的产业，例如电脑服务业和资本密集型的制造业。
然而，要应对经济低迷，印度在两个方面比中国有优势。对经济低迷，它实在太有经验了；而且它有一个可以在应对不满的同时又不会引发存在性疑问的政治体系。印度为它的民主付出了经济代价。决策进程迟缓。而且和中国一样，动荡甚至叛乱十分普遍。但它的政治体系拥有弹性和灵活性，中国领导人似乎认为他们缺乏这种弹性和灵活性，他们担心如何应对示威，而印度则盯着日益临近的选举。
[ 本帖最后由 j小蜜蜂 于 2008-12-12 21:49 编辑 ] |
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