10月28日，复旦大学经济学院院长、中国社会主义市场经济研究中心主任张军教授在Project Syndicate官网上发表文章：Three Threats
to China’s Economy。
报业辛迪加（Project Syndicate）被称为“世界上最具智慧的专栏”，作者来自全球顶级经济学者、诺奖得主、政界领袖，主题包括全球政治、经济、科学与文化塑造者的观点，为全球读者提供来自全球最高端的原创文章、最具深度的评论，为解读“变动中的世界”提供帮助。
以下为文章全文：
SHANGHAI – After a decades-long “growth
miracle,” China’s economy has lately become a source of mounting concern. Some
factors – from high corporate debt to overcapacity in the state sector – have
received a lot of attention. But three less-discussed trends point to still
other threats to the country’s economic development.
First, despite the decline in GDP growth,
social financing – and especially credit – has increased. This relates directly
to China’s debt problem: the continual rolling over of large liabilities
creates a constant demand for liquidity, even if actual investment does not
increase. Such “credit expansion” – which is really just rolled-over debt – is
not sustainable.
Clearly, the debt issue must be addressed.
And the Chinese government has been working to do so, implementing policies
aimed at supporting debt restructuring. For example, the central government has
helped local authorities to replace CN¥3.2 trillion ($471.9 billion) of risky
debt in 2015, and ¥5 trillion this year. Its corporate debt-for-equity swap
plan could augment the impact of these efforts.
But these strategies cannot fully address
China’s debt problem, not least because the largest share of debt in China is
held by state-owned enterprises. One solution that has been proposed would
involve a far-reaching restructuring of large SOEs. The sale or transfer of
state-owned assets would cover liabilities, breaking the state sector out of
its debt-ridden status quo. This approach would also create an
opportunity to advance privatization, which could bolster innovation and
competitiveness.
The second risky trend is the rapid decline
in fixed-asset investment, from 20% to around 8% today. The decline has been
particularly marked in the private sector. In 2002-2012, growth in private-sector
investment averaged around 20%; by the end of last year, it amounted to just
10%, and from January to August of this year, it reached just 2.1%, including a
stunning 1.2% contraction in July. Investment in real estate has also slowed,
having increased by just over 1% last year, owing to a number of policy
constraints.
Given that private investment accounts for
at least 60% of total investment in manufacturing, this will undoubtedly have
macroeconomic consequences. And, though double-digit growth in state-sector
investment will temper the overall effect, this trend also reflects problems
with state-sector dominance. Private companies struggle to gain credit from
state-owned commercial banks and are at a disadvantage in the direct financing
market. Moreover, private firms are blocked from entering SOE-dominated,
capital-intensive, and high-end service industries. In most of the modern
service sectors, the share of non-state actors remains small, limiting private
investment.
The third trend that should be worrying
China is that unemployment remains relatively steady. Because the unemployment
rate is not excessively high, this might seem like a good thing. But it
reflects some negative trends – starting with long-term weakness in
productivity growth.
China’s productivity growth rate, which
averaged 8% over the last 20 years, may have dropped now to less than 6%. And
the country is not exactly positioned for a surge in productivity. According to
the National Bureau of Statistics, the services sector has far outpaced
manufacturing in employment growth since 2010, a reversal of the earlier trend.
Given the need for China to move away from
manufacturing, this is not altogether bad news. But most of the service-sector
jobs being created are in low-end, low-productivity activities. Worse, these
are often informal jobs characterized by high turnover, which impedes
human-capital accumulation.
Stable employment levels in China also
reflect – yet again – shortcomings in the state sector. Few workers have been
released from SOEs, despite the overall growth slowdown. In other words, there
is considerable hidden unemployment in China’s state sector, which is already
plagued by other kinds of overcapacity.
China has no easy option for addressing
this problem. If the government continues to prop up SOEs, especially “zombie”
firms, the concentration of a large number of workers in low-productivity,
stagnant SOEs will continue to undermine productivity growth. But if China
pursues state-sector restructuring, unemployment will rise. And, once
unemployed, state-sector workers tend take much longer to find a new job than
their private-sector counterparts do.
Yet state-sector restructuring seems
unavoidable. Indeed, it would help to address a number of the most fundamental
challenges facing China, from debt and overcapacity to lack of competitiveness.
To be sure, some claim that SOEs should be
allowed to continue their operations, citing their huge profits. But those
profits are the result of their monopoly status and massive state investment,
which brings lower returns than private-sector investment. That is why progress
on SOE reform is so urgent, regardless of the short- and even medium-term
challenges that it might create.
Two decades ago, then-Premier Zhu Rongji
began to pursue such reform, with the goal of bolstering the efficiency of SOEs
and creating space for private-sector investment. But the reforms were
incomplete, and some have even been rolled back, with SOEs regaining market
share in some cases.
In 2013, the Third Plenum of the 18th
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China took up the mantle, with a
plan to reform SOEs through mixed ownership. But here, too, progress has been
inadequate. And, in fact, without a strategic reorganization of SOEs, mixed
ownership will become a feature of only non-essential sectors.
If China is to succeed in its economic
restructuring, industrial upgrading, and expansion of high-productivity
services, the role of SOEs needs to be limited to a few relevant sectors. Only
then can China recapture its dynamism and keep its economic development on
track.
文章来源：Project Syndicate
