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发帖数: 2744 | 1 source：http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/09/opinion/chinas-obsolete-economic-strategy.html
It was inevitable that China’s economy would slow from its once
turbocharged growth rates. But its leaders have made so many mistakes in
recent months that they have turned what should have been a benign, natural
slowdown into a chaotic descent.
China’s main stock index fell nearly 10 percent for the week, depressing
stock and commodity prices elsewhere. These drops are not in themselves a
big economic problem. The larger question is whether China’s leaders, their
credibility already damaged, will see this moment for what it is: a
dramatic warning that it’s time to make fundamental changes in the way they
manage the economy.
The Chinese economy, the world’s second largest, is growing at nearly 7
percent a year — down from 10.6 percent in 2010 but still a healthy pace
for a country at its stage of development. The problem is that the boom was
fueled by lavish investment and spending as well as profligate borrowing, a
lot of which will probably not be paid back. China’s central government
orchestrated that binge by pumping billions of dollars into the economy in
the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and by failing to enact
needed reforms that would make it easier for private and foreign companies
to compete with inefficient state-owned enterprises.
Beginning last year, Chinese officials also used state-owned media to
encourage individual investors to pour their savings and borrowed money into
the stock market, leading to a massive bubble. When the market started to
tumble over the summer, the government blamed rumormongers and speculators,
and ordered securities firms and state-owned companies to keep buying, which
simply disguised the underlying problems.
The lesson here is clear: Instead of trying to micromanage stock prices,
Chinese officials ought to be strengthening the economy, foremost by
shifting its emphasis from investment to consumer spending and services.
This is important because China can no longer grow by taking people off the
farm and putting them to work in factories. It needs to move people into
white-collar jobs. To take one example, officials could help create more
such jobs and make the economy more competitive by easing the way for
private companies to get into industries like telecommunications and
insurance that are currently dominated by a handful of state-owned
corporations.
China also has to clean up its financial system. Many businesses and local
governments have borrowed billions of dollars to build high-speed rail lines
, real estate developments and other projects, many of which are not going
to produce the returns needed to pay off those debts. The government should
encourage lenders and borrowers to quickly restructure loans that paid for
those projects so that banks are not crippled by bad debts and can continue
making new loans. Officials also need to shut down highly inefficient state-
owned businesses.
How China deals with its problems will have far-reaching implications
because the country has become such a big part of the world economy. It is
one of the biggest consumers of commodities like oil, soybeans and iron ore,
and when demand falters, economies in Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa
suffer. The price of crude oil fell to about $33 a barrel this week, down
from about $50 a year earlier.
Even industrialized countries like Germany, Japan and the United States are
vulnerable, though less so than commodity exporters, because they sell
manufactured goods to China and many multinational companies have invested a
lot of money in the country. Some analysts are concerned that Beijing will
simply fall back on a familiar tool to aid the domestic economy: devaluing
the currency, the renminbi. That would raise China’s exports and reduce its
imports, but it would do so at the expense of the rest of the global
economy, which is itself not very healthy.
Since early August, the renminbi has already fallen about 5 percent against
the dollar. It has also been under pressure because as the Chinese economy
weakens many people and companies in China are clamoring to convert their
savings into dollars to buy property and invest in businesses overseas.
Ultimately, however, China’s leaders must realize that they need to
modernize their policies by encouraging more private initiatives and greater
competition. Their nation has changed dramatically over the last three
decades, and a command-and-control approach to economic management will not
produce the results of the past. |
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