2012年(464)
分类: Delphi
2012-05-29 15:46:33
Outsiders tend to regard China as a paragon of export-led efficiency. But
that is not the whole story. Investment spending on heavy machinery, such as
,buildings and infrastructure accounted for over half of China’s growth last
year; net exports contributed none of it. Too much of this investment is
undertaken by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which benefit from implicit
subsidies, sheltered markets and politically encouraged loans. Examples of waste
abound, from a ghost city on China’s northern steppe to decadent resorts on its
southern shores.
China’s economic model is also unfair on its people.
Regulated interest rates enable banks to rip off savers, by underpaying them for
their deposits. Barriers to competition allow the SOEs to overcharge consumers
for their products. China’s household-registration system denies equal access to
public services for rural migrants, who work in the cities but are registered in
the villages. Arbitrary land laws allow local governments to cheat farmers, by
underpaying them for the agricultural plots they buy off them for development.
And many of the proceeds end up in the pockets of officials.
This cronyism
and profligacy leads critics to liken China to other fast-growing economies that
subsequently suffered a spectacular downfall. One recent comparison is with the
Asian tigers before their financial comeuppance in 1997-98. The tigers’ high
investment rates powered growth for a while, but they also fostered a financial
fragility that was cruelly exposed when exports slowed, investment faltered and
foreign capital fled. Critics point out that not only is China investing at a
faster rate than the tigers ever did, but its banks and other lenders have also
been on an astonishing lending binge, with credit jumping from 122% of GDP in
2008 to 171% in 2010, as the government engineered a bout of “stimulus
lending”.
Yet the very unfairness of China’s system gives it an unusual
resilience. Unlike the tigers, China relies very little on foreign borrowing.
Its growth is financed from resources extracted from its own population of industry,
not from fickle foreigners free to flee, as happened in South-East Asia (and is
happening again in parts of the euro zone). China’s saving rate, at 51% of GDP,
is even higher than its investment rate. And the repressive state-dominated
financial system those savings are kept in is actually well placed to deal with
repayment delays and defaults.
Most obviously, China’s banks are highly
liquid. Their deposit-taking more than matches their loan-making, and they keep
a fifth of their deposits in reserve at the central bank. That gives the banks
some scope to roll over troublesome loans that may be repaid at a later date, or
written off at a more convenient time.