【彭博社120103】Malcolm Gladwell Test Has Japan Turning Chinese

lilyma06

Malcolm Gladwell Test Has Japan Turning Chinese: William Pesek
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-03/malcolm-gladwell-test-has-japan-look-to-china-commentary-by-william-pesek.html
If you want to silence a room filledwith Japanese politicians, suggest they should learn from China (CNGDPYOY). The conventional wisdom favors the flip side of thisdynamic: China should be studying Japan’s playbook. Japan, afterall, is an example of both what China needs to do (create avibrant domestic economy and high living standards) and what itmustn’t (slide into bad-loan crises and deflation).
Yet I have one word for Japanese policy makers who dismissthe idea they should heed China’s example: Shenzhen.
For two decades now, economists have been urging Tokyo (TPX) tocreate a special-enterprise zone or two. The idea is to have alaboratory where officials could try drastic alternatives toJapan’s rigid, bureaucratic and change-resistant model -- acontrolled environment in which the nationwide laws and normsthat thwart economic energy could be repealed.
Southern China features such a place. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping started China’s first special-economic zone in acoastal village that was nothing to look at. Today, Shenzhen isa teeming collage of huge skyscrapers, thriving industrialparks, 10 million people, one of the world’s busiest ports, andsome of the biggest manufacturing and outsourcing industriesanywhere.
China’s Example It’s the center of Chinese experimentation. There,officials can test what works and what doesn’t: which corporatetax rates offer the best balance of attracting foreigninvestment while filling government coffers in Beijing, whichlabor standards make the most sense, which corporate-governancestandards are most advantageous, which immigration proceduresare optimal, which regulations stay or go.
China’s experience inspired nations as disparate as Angola,Bangladesh, Brazil, Iran, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Poland,Russia and even North Korea to erect special economic regions.India, too. You can argue that India’s software industry is suchan entity -- one immune enough from New Delhi’s dysfunction tocreate the growth and jobs India so badly needs.
Why not Japan? Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister from 2001to 2006, broached the issue, but his vision was nevereffectively implemented. Of all the growth-revitalizingstrategies employed by Tokyo (TPX), the most favored ones are debt andconcrete -- debt to finance white-elephant public-worksprojects, concrete to build them. Japan is too much about savingunproductive jobs, not creating innovative new ones.
What Japan never tried is a dose of supply-side economics.No, this column isn’t advocating a sudden Japanese embrace ofthe ideologies of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan. Yet Japan hasgotten as far it can with financial socialism. Even after morethan two decades of start-and-stop growth, Japan’s focus is onpreserving its way of life, not adjusting to the demands ofglobalization and Chinese (SHCOMP) competition. The big debates in Tokyoare over raising taxes and joining free-trade deals.
Some fresh thinking is in order, and Japan’s March 11earthquake and tsunami provided a perfect opportunity. There aremany cities the government could declare as economic-policylabs: Fukuoka, Kobe, Nagasaki, Sapporo, Yokohama. The devastatedNortheastern Tohoku region is a better choice.
“Tohoku can be to Japan what Shenzhen was to China,” saysJeff Kingston, head of the Asian Studies program at TempleUniversity’s Tokyo campus.
Kingston’s favored regime: Allow large-scale deregulation,cut red tape that frustrates businesses, offer 10-year taxholidays for new investments and incentives for employersgenerating full-time jobs, apply a corporate tax rate in theneighborhood of 11 percent, suspend gasoline taxes, subsidizeelectricity, eliminate sales taxes, and structure a variety ofenticements to attract capital into renewable-energy researchand production.
Tax Holiday Martin Schulz, a senior economist at Fujitsu ResearchInstitute in Tokyo, would take things a step further and simplymake Tohoku corporate-tax free. That, he argues, would get youngpeople and families into a region that was dying demographicallyeven before the earth shook and the waters rose.
All this would get Japan closer to passing the Malcolm Gladwell test. Days after the earthquake that triggered theworst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, the author of “TheTipping Point” told Bloomberg: “The only time you can getthings done is in moments of genuine crisis and catastrophes --there’s a small opportunity to do an extraordinary amount.Japan, a country whose politics were in deadlock and sluggishfor many, many years, I hope they can seize this moment andaccomplish a lot.”
Gladwell’s view that a crisis is a terrible thing to wastearguably dovetails with the so-called shock doctrine advocateddecades earlier by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. I haven’tspoken with a single Japanese who believes the governmentachieved much of anything in 2011, never mind turning disasterinto an opportunity. Japan must do better in 2012.
China has much to learn from Japan. From the ashes of WorldWar II, it created a safe, prosperous, universally literate,environmentally stable and reasonably egalitarian nation. YetJapan has long since lost the vibrancy and policy innovationthat propelled it to today’s heights.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s first act of 2012 should beto create a Japanese Shenzhen. It would be a much-neededrecognition that if Japan can’t beat China, it can at leastlearn a thing or two from Asia’s economic upstart.



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