【英语中国】观点：中国房地产热的代价

Michael Kurtz

A Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study making the rounds lately has revived bubble fears by suggesting that a startling 64.5 million urban housing units -- one for every four households -- is sitting empty, based on dormant electricity meter readings. Local utilities have since stepped forward to try to discredit the CASS numbers. But even if they are accurate, fears of a property crash may be misplaced.

The real risk to China's economy is not a property price collapse, but the way in which the supply overhang inhibits economic restructuring. Overinvestment in real estate is creating barriers to financial reform and entrenching chronic inefficiencies just as the country needs to retool its growth model.

In the distorted world of China's 'state capitalism,' demand for 'unneeded' housing is surprisingly if perversely rational. That's why property sales are rebounding smartly since policy makers hinted in July that administrative tightening in the sector had reached its limit. To understand why demand is so resilient, one needs to consider the poor savings alternatives available to Chinese households.

First a bit of fiscal background. The ruling Communist Party over the years has developed an understandable reluctance to directly tax individuals. In part, this is presumably because larger individual tax bills sooner or later could lead to demands for a say in how such funds are spent, developments not easily reconciled with China's single-party system. For similar reasons, local governments also have avoided levying value-based property ownership taxes, relying instead on revenue from land sales to developers.

Instead, Beijing raises funds from households via low deposit interest rates in the state-owned bank oligopoly, a 'cost' subsidy for China's banks that lenders then pass on to state-owned enterprises in the form of low-priced loans. These companies then pay tax to the state. It's fiscal policy disguised as commercial banking.

Interest rates in China are probably 300 basis points or more below where a market-sensitive financial system would put them. The 12-month deposit rate is currently just 2.3%, meaningfully below CPI inflation that, even benignly tilted via the makeup of the index, is about to pass through 3.0%, and not even in the same league with first-half nominal GDP growth of 16.7%. So putting your money in the bank is a losing proposition.

This financial repression forces hundreds of millions of households to look outside the banks in search of better inflation-hedged investments. But with China's restricted capital account, savers are mostly confined to a domestic-only palette of alternatives.

Enter China's property developers, the rational market response to China's irrational, non-market interest rate structure, and a seemingly irresistible domestic alternative to bank savings. China's nationwide housing price index has risen about 10% per year since 2001 with reasonable consistency. Property has also substantially outperformed China's only other other sizeable domestic savings alternative, stocks, which have returned one-sixth as much over the past decade, and with a level of volatility that has scared off many savers.

In any case, China's citizens, raised with an awareness of their country's heartbreakingly tumultuous history of messy dynastic successions, invasions and expropriation, have come to value tangibility as an attribute. A housing unit is solid and intrinsically valuable, although not portable. By comparison, from the Chinese perspective a share of stock is merely a claim on a distant and impersonal management's promise of a future that may never materialize.

So a well-off middle-income Chinese family with savings to deploy may rationally choose to put their savings into even an empty housing unit. Without an annual property tax, the carrying cost of a vacant unit is effectively zero. This also reduces incentives to seek rental yield as an offset to carrying costs, one reason why empty units are so prevalent. Presumptive capital gains seem to be satisfactory for most investor-owners.

With such demand distortions entrenched, and particularly assuming inflation remains a factor, China would not appear to be an oversupplied market. The modest price pullbacks of May-June have enticed buyers back out of the woodwork in recent weeks. Centaline Property in Shanghai estimates that even at China's now-reduced monthly transaction volumes (half of where they were in late-2009), the primary residential market has only three to four months of outstanding supply, well below the long-term average of seven to eight months.

Those same demand distortions, though, also portend at least three difficult eventual transitions for China's property market in the not-distant future: interest rate reform, which over time would increase returns to bank savings and reduce property's relative attractions; capital account liberalization, which would broaden Chinese households' access to the world of cross-border investment alternatives; and the introduction of value-based property ownership taxes to reduce local governments' reliance on land-sale revenues, which would impose a carrying cost for empty housing.

Tricky as these reforms may prove, each is central to the economic restructuring and efficiency improvement Beijing hopes to pull off in the next few years, meaning difficult decisions and trade-offs lie ahead. The true risk may be that by having allowed a potential property overhang to come into existence, Chinese policy makers paint themselves into a corner where essential reforms such as financial liberalization and fiscal restructuring seem too dicey to implement. If so, China may be able to keep its firm property market, but at the cost of postponing progress beyond a capital-wasting bank-SOE complex ill-suited to China's economic future.

(Editor's Note: Mr. Kurtz is Shanghai-based China strategist and head of China research for Macquarie Securities.)

Michael Kurtz

中国社会科学院最近一份流传甚广的报告重新激起人们对泡沫的担忧。报告说，从显示为零的电表读数判断，中国共有6,450万套城市住房空置，也就是每四户一套。电力部门后来出面辟谣，力图证明社科院数据不实。但就算这个数据是准确的，人们对楼市崩盘的担忧或许也是弄错了对象。

中国经济的真正风险不是房价崩溃，而在于供给过剩如何阻碍着经济结构的调整。在国家需要改变增长模式之际，房地产的过度投资正在给金融改革设置障碍，并固化长期以来的低效率。

在中国“国家资本主义”的扭曲世界，“非必需”住房的需求是非常理性的，不说理性得反常，至少是也理性得让人吃惊。正因为这个原因，自政策制定者7月份暗示房地产市场的行政调控已达极限以来，房产销售一直在迅速反弹。要理解为什么需求如此具有韧性，就得考虑到中国家庭少得可怜的替代性储蓄渠道。

先介绍点财政方面的背景。过去几年，执政的共产党慢慢地不再愿意对个人直接征税。这是可以理解的，想必有一部分原因在于，如果对个人提高税收，民众或迟或早地会要求公开这些钱是怎么花出去的。在中国一党执政的制度下，出现这种情况不容易调解。出于类似的原因，地方政府同样也避免以房价为基础征收房产保有税，而是依靠向开发商出售土地而获取收入。

北京从家庭筹资，是通过国有银行寡头的低存款利率来进行的。低利率是提供给银行的一种“成本”补贴，银行然后以低息贷款的形式把这种补贴传递给国有企业，然后由这些国有企业向国家纳税。其财政政策化装成了商业银行业务。

在一种对市场灵敏的金融体系中，中国的利率恐怕要比现行利率高出300多个基点。当前12个月期存款利率只有2.3%，明显低于CPI（消费者价格指数）增幅。CPI的构成使之向好的一面倾斜，但看样子也将要突破3.0%。而和上半年名义GDP（国内生产总值）16.7%的增长速度比起来，存款利率根本不在同一水平线上。所以把钱存在银行就是一桩亏本买卖。

这种金融压制(financial repression)迫使数亿家庭寻找银行以外更有利于对冲通货膨胀的投资渠道。但在中国资本账户受到限制的情况下，多数存款人只能投资于国内有限的几种替代性渠道。

进入中国房地产市场是对于中国非理性、非市场化的利率结构的理性应对，同时似乎也是无可抗拒的储蓄替代品。自2001年起，中国全国房价指数以每年大约10%的幅度连续上涨。房地产同时也大大超越了中国除此之外的唯一一个储蓄替代品──股票，过去十年中，股市回报只有楼市的六分之一，其波动性也吓退了许多储蓄者。

无论如何，中国民众从小就了解自己国家令人心酸的动荡历史──混乱的朝代更迭、侵占、剥夺，因此他们开始看重有形资产。房子本身是牢固可靠的，也有其固有的价值，虽然不能随身携带。相比之下，从中国人的观点来看，股票只是锁定了某个不认识的遥远管理团队对于未来的承诺，很有可能永远无法兑现。

因此，手头宽裕的中等收入家庭如果有储蓄可供支配，那他们可能会理性地选择将钱用来买房子，即便买了也只是空着。由于不用每年交物业税，空置房的维持成本几乎为零。如此一来人们也没有动力寻求租金收益以抵消维持成本，这也是空置房屋如此普遍的原因之一。对于大多数以投资为目的的房主来说，假定的资本收益似乎令他们满意。

由于这类畸形需求根深蒂固，尤其是假定通胀仍然是人们考虑的一个因素，中国将不会呈现出供应过度的状况。5月至6月房价略微下滑又吸引买家近几周重新出手。上海的中原地产估计，即便是中国当前月度成交量下降的情况下（当前仅为2009年底的一半），一手住宅市场也只有三到四个月的存量，远低于七个月到八个月的长期平均水平。

不过这类失真的需求也预示着中国房地产市场在不远的将来至少面临三个最终的艰难转型：利率改革，随着时间推移将增加银行储蓄的回报，降低房产的相对吸引力；资本帐户自由化，中国家庭将由此扩大进行跨境投资的渠道；引入基于价值的物业税，以减少地方政府对土地出让收入的依赖，这样一来也会令空置房屋产生维持成本。

虽然这些改革或许困难重重，但每一项都对北京方面希望在未来几年内实施的经济结构调整和提高效率至关重要，这意味着未来将面临艰难的决策和平衡。真正的风险或许在于，中国决策者允许了潜在的房地产威胁存在，从而就让自己陷入了困境，令金融改革和财政调整等必要的改革显得过于冒险、难以实施。如果是这样，中国或许可以保持其稳固的房地产市场，但付出的代价或许就是要推迟废除银行-国企联合体的进程，银行与国企的密切关系造成资本的浪费，不利于中国经济的未来。

(编者按：本文作者为麦格理证券(Macquarie Securities)驻上海的中国策略师，也是中国研究主管。)

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