【英语生活】要想富，修铁路

Railways are back in fashion. Globally, the industry has been booming, thanks less to high oil prices than to a growing emphasis on the environmental benefits of trains over planes. The UK now has its first high-speed railway line (a few decades after everyone else), Barack Obama is promising similar links in the US, Japanese-built bullet trains are making a splash in Taiwan, and the French seem never to have lost their love of fast trains. Then, of course, there are the rather slower trains operated by the state-owned Indian Railways, the world's largest commercial employer, with 1.4 million staff.

But it is the rail system of a bygone India that has attracted my attention recently. Colonial India – which comprised present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – had no railways in 1850 but more than 60,000km of track by 1930. What difference did that expansion make to the country's economy?

Dave Donaldson is a young economist who now knows more about the details of colonial railways than anyone alive. For his PhD research on the subject at the LSE, Donaldson had to build a massive database based on paper records of the railway building programme, gathered in painstaking detail by colonial officials.

It seems obvious that the railways should have had a large impact – they did not compete with cars or planes, but with bullocks on dirt roads that a train could outpace by a factor of 20. But not everyone was convinced. Romesh Dutt, an Indian historian and politician, argued over a century ago that the railways did not help rural areas, while Mahatma Gandhi saw them as promoters of the bubonic plague and accessories to famine. (If they can ship food in, he reasoned, they can also ship food out.) And it is certainly true that the British had military aims uppermost in their minds when they built the network.

But, according to Donaldson's research, the sceptics are wrong. The railways profoundly improved the rural economies through which they passed. Thanks to a data-hungry colonial administration, which collected information on local crop prices and rainfall, Donaldson was able to calculate the improvements with some precision.

He discovered that whenever two regions were linked by rail, prices of transportable products converged; local droughts no longer affected food prices, but widespread droughts elsewhere suddenly did; local income became less volatile; and income levels rose by almost 20 per cent, although they fell slightly in areas bypassed by the railways. Donaldson tracks all of these (largely beneficial) effects to the fact that the railways increased trade with other regions of India and the world beyond. It is one of those periodic reminders, which economists need to put out to the rest of the world, that allowing people to trade with those outside their immediate community is not an entirely pernicious act.

Since the alternatives to the train are somewhat better in modern western nations than they were in the India of 1860, I doubt that spiffy high-speed rail links will have quite the same effect. Still, Donaldson's research is a reminder of the huge importance of quality transport links. It will come as encouragement to the World Bank, an enthusiastic supporter of transport infrastructure projects, which have recently made up one fifth of all new lending.

The Bank has also started to target unnecessary barriers to internal and external trade, from age-old standbys such as tariffs, to corruption and red tape at border crossings. It should be cheaper to deal with them than build a new road or railway, and just as important.

铁路再度受到追捧。在全球范围内，铁路行业一直蓬勃发展。主要原因并非高油价，而是因为人们日益注重火车对环境的影响小于飞机这一因素。英国如今建成了第一条高速铁路（比其它国家晚了几十年），巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)承诺美国也要建高铁，日本造的子弹头列车在台湾引起轰动，而法国似乎从未失去对快速列车的喜爱。当然，也有像印度国有铁路公司(Indian Railways)运营的那种速度较慢的列车，该公司是世界上最庞大的商业公司，雇员多达140万人。

但近来引起我注意的，是旧印度的铁路系统。殖民时期的印度（包括如今的印度、巴基斯坦和孟加拉）在1850年时还没有铁路，但到1930年，该国铁路里程已超过6万公里。那么，修建铁路对该国经济产生了什么影响呢？

年轻经济学家戴夫•唐纳森(Dave Donaldson)对于印度殖民时期铁路情况的了解，恐怕胜过当世任何一个人。他目前在伦敦政治经济学院(LSE)攻读博士学位，为进行相关课题的研究，他必须根据当年殖民地官员费心整理的、有关铁路建设计划的详细书面纪录，构建一个庞大的数据库。

铁路应该会产生巨大影响，这一点似乎显而易见。火车虽不能与汽车或飞机相提并论，但较之在土路上飞奔的公牛，它的速度要快上20倍。但并非所有人都相信这一点。半个世纪前，印度历史学家兼政治家罗梅什•杜特(Romesh Dutt)就曾声称，铁路对农村地区毫无帮助。圣雄甘地(Mahatma Gandhi)则认为，铁路促进了黑死病的传播，是饥荒的帮手（他的理由是，火车既然能运来粮食，就也能运走粮食）。而且，有一点是千真万确的：当年英国在印度建造铁路网络，把军事目的摆在了首要位置。

但根据唐纳森的研究，这些怀疑论者错了。铁路深刻地改善了途经地区的农村经济。得益于渴求数据的殖民地政府——他们收集有关当地粮食价格和降雨量的信息——唐纳森得以较为准确地估算铁路在改善农村经济方面的作用。

他发现，只要两个地区之间通了铁路，可运输商品的价格就会趋向一致；当地旱灾不再会影响粮食价格，但发生在其他地方的大范围旱灾会骤然影响本地粮价；地方居民收入变得较为稳定；收入水平上升近20%，而没有铁路经过的地区，居民收入略有下降。唐纳森把产生所有这些影响（大部分是有益的影响）的源头，归结为以下事实：铁路促进了一个地方与印度国内其他地方、以及与世界其他地区之间的贸易。这应不时提醒我们，允许人们与本地区之外的人进行贸易，并非一种完全有害无益的做法。关于诸如此类的事情，经济学家有必要在全世界大力宣扬。

就可以替代火车的交通工具而言，现代西方国家的情况肯定要强于1860年时的印度。有鉴于此，我怀疑那些漂亮的高速铁路还具有同样的作用。不过，唐纳森的研究提醒我们，优良的交通工具非常重要。这会令世界银行(WB)感到鼓舞，世行热心支持交通基础设施项目，其近期提供的新贷款中，此类贷款占到了五分之一。

世行也开始把阻碍内、外部贸易的各种不必要壁垒当作目标，如年代久远的关税、腐败以及繁杂的海关手续。处理这些问题的成本应会低于修筑一条铁路或公路，而重要性不相上下。

译者/岱嵩