【英语财经】中国经济之车需要“四轮驱动” China’s economy: the four engines of growth

China’s economic growth surprised on the upside in the third quarter. Yet markets will probably remain fixated on the economy’s slow-down and on the devaluation of the renminbi in August. We are in a world where volatilities rule, economic opinions differ and geopolitical conspiracy theories abound.

The mainstream view on the Chinese economy is that it will slow considerably, and only return to healthy growth if it can be “rebalanced” away from investment and exports to a household consumption-driven model. This view is incomplete at least, and misguided in some aspects.

The Chinese economy, over the next two decades before China becomes a high-income country, will be driven by four engines.

First, infrastructure and related investment will continue to drive the economy forward, as they have for the past four decades. China’s per capita GDP ranks 90th in the world. Beijing’s most recent urbanisation plan calls for 100m more people to be moved from farming regions to cities by 2020, and 250m by 2026. The need for infrastructure and other investments driven by this continued massive urbanisation process is enormous.

The per capita capital stock of China today roughly equates to the level in the US in the 1930s. The potential marginal return of capital-intensive investment, while lower than before, is likely to continue to be higher than what we typically see in a high middle income country.

In addition, as Carnegie Endowment’s Yukon Huang pointed in an article in Caixin last month, compared with South Korea and Japan, Chinese’s economy is replete with distortions that the others did not have at a comparable stage in their development. The Chinese government’s current attempts to address such distortions, such as through the continued SOE and hybrid economy reforms, are likely to lead to significant improvements in productivity. The “reform dividend” will continue to pay off. In short, the investment-driven “old economy” is likely to continue to thrive if the right policies are in place.

The second engine is China’s “new economy”, which is centred in the services sector and grounded on rising levels of household consumptions, especially in urban areas. Since 2007, the services sector has consistently outgrown the primary and secondary sectors. Over the past five years, the contribution to GDP growth from the services sector has grown from 39 per cent to 57 per cent, reflecting greater demand for health care, education, tourism, entertainment, telecommunications, etc. As the provision of services is dominated by the private sector, the share of government and SOE employment in China’s urban areas has declined from 59 per cent in 1995 to 20 per cent in 2015.

The third engine, reflecting the unique state-private sector dynamics in China, is the ability for the government to marshal state resources to make investments that both generate a long-term economic return and improve the quality of life for Chinese people. As I argued back in 2012 in a Foreign Policy article on Bo Xilai’s “Chongqing model”, the Chinese government, at both central and provincial levels, has been consistently willing and able to invest in such “quality of life investment” projects. An example is the affordable housing projects called “social housing”. The government’s target is to build enough social housing to accommodate 23 per cent of the urban populace by 2020, up from an estimated 14 per cent in 2011. This translates into an additional 30m units over seven years, according to UBS economist Tao Wang. While such social housing projects will take the form of real estate investments, they will improve people’s quality of life in the short term and stimulate additional demand and consumption.

The fourth and final engine for China’s continued growth is to export infrastructure and over-capacity to other countries, through increased connectivity under the new Silk Road and “one belt, on road” strategy. The newly established Silk Road Fund and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) would corner-stone such efforts. The recent industrial parks set up in Ethiopia, Zambia, Nigeria and other Africa countries, long advocated by my former World Bank colleague Justin Lin, are another way to move beyond exports of goods and services to exports of capacity, and of development experience more broadly.

While the west ponders why Beijing uses this awkward-sounding label “one belt, one road”, Beijing is in fact astute with its reference to the Silk Road: if efforts for better connectivity could be done 400 years ago by our ancestors, there is no reason we cannot do it again today. It will certainly take longer for this engine to deliver growth to China than the other three domestic engines described above, but the Belt-Road strategy would have the most significant long-term impact for the world, as it potentially unlocks the “connectivity value” of the global economy beyond the level of connectivity today. The globalised world is interconnected through flows of goods, capital, technology, people, information, security and even mindsets. Beijing’s experiment with its Belt-Road strategy could significantly re-define and broaden such connectivity, in addition to bringing economic growth to China and the other countries involved.

The paradigm shift on August 11 to a more direct, market-based mechanism to set exchange rates for the renminbi would also in the medium term further strengthen the connectivity between China and the rest of the world, in particular the Eastern Asian countries whose trade links with China are the strongest. In spite of heightened volatility in the short term, especially vis a vis the US dollar compared with the more tightly-controlled and US dollar-benchmarked regime of the past, this will become increasingly apparent as the PBOC reduces the level of its interventions.

It is clear that in August the Chinese government mishandled its desire to manage the domestic equity market. Fortunately, China’s equity market is a fraction of the size of its US equivalent and matters very little to most Chinese investors, the Chinese real economy or the global economy. The fundamentals of the Chinese economy matter far more, and they continue to be strong and the economy will continue to grow robustly, driven by these four engines.

Dr Kevin Lu is a Managing Director at Partners Group, a global private equity firm.

第三季度中国经济增长率好于预期。然而，市场很可能依然紧盯着经济放缓和8月份的人民币贬值。当今世界，波动成为常态，经济观点各不相同，地缘政治阴谋论比比皆是。

对于中国经济的主流观点是，中国经济将显著放缓，只有实现增长模式从投资和出口拉动型向家庭消费拉动型“再平衡”，中国经济才能恢复健康增长。这种观点至少可以说是不全面的，从某些方面来说也是错误的。

在中国成为高收入国家之前，接下来20年中国经济将依靠四个引擎拉动。

第一，就像过去40年一样，基础设施和相关投资将继续拉动经济前进。中国的人均国民生产总值(GDP)在世界上排在第90位。北京方面最新的城镇化计划要求到2020年时，再使1亿人从农业地区迁至城市，到2026年再迁2.5亿。持续的大规模城镇化进程将带动对基础设施和其他投资的巨大需求。

今天中国的人均资本存量大约和美国上世纪30年代的水平持平。资本密集型投资的潜在边际回报尽管低于之前的水平，有可能仍将高于中高收入国家的普遍水平。

此外，就像卡内基国际和平基金会(Carnegie Endowment)的黄育川上月在《财新》的一篇文章中指出的，与韩国和日本相比，中国经济充满了其他经济体在类似发展阶段不存在的种种扭曲。目前中国政府试图应对这些扭曲，比如通过持续的国企改革和混合经济改革等举措，这或许能够显著提高生产率。“改革红利”将持续发放。简而言之，如果实施了正确的政策，依靠投资拉动的“旧经济”还有可能继续繁荣。

第二个引擎是中国的“新经济”，这种经济以服务业为中心，建立在（尤其是城市地区）家庭消费水平不断提高的基础之上。2007年以来，服务业的发展一直比第一和第二产业更快。过去5年，服务业对GDP增长的贡献率从39%增长到了57%，反映了对医疗保健、教育、旅游、娱乐和电信等服务的更大需求。由于私营部门主导了服务提供，在中国城市地区，政府和国企员工占就业人员的比例已从1995年的59%降至2015年的20%。

第三个引擎是政府调集国家资源进行投资的能力（这种投资不仅产生长期经济回报，还提高中国人的生活质量），反映了中国国有部门和私营部门之间独特的相互关系。就像2012年我在《外交政策》(Foreign Policy)杂志上发表的一篇有关薄熙来“重庆模式”的文章里所主张的，中国的中央和省级政府一直都有意愿和能力投资所谓的“生活质量投资”项目。一个例子是被称为“保障性住房”的廉价住房项目。政府的目标是建造足够多的保障性住房，让城镇常住人口保障性住房覆盖率到2020年达到23%，2011年这个数字估计为14%。根据瑞银(UBS)经济学家汪涛2014年初的说法，这意味在要在6年多的时间里新建3000万套保障性住房。尽管保障性住房项目将采取房地产投资的形式，它们能在短期内提高人们的生活质量，并催生额外的需求和消费。

推动中国继续增长的第四个也是最后一个引擎，是通过新丝绸之路(New Silk Road)和“一带一路”(One Belt, One Road)战略增加中国与相关国家的连通性，从而对外输出基础设施和过剩产能。新成立的丝路基金(Silk Road Fund)和亚洲基础设施投资银行（AIIB，简称亚投行）将为上述努力奠定基础。近年来埃塞俄比亚、赞比亚、尼日利亚等非洲国家都建立了工业园，这是中国超越商品和服务输出，转向产能输出，以及更广泛的发展经验输出的另一种方式，这种方式也是曾在世界银行(World Bank)与我共事的林毅夫(Justin Lin)长期以来倡导的。

西方纳闷为什么北京方面要使用“一带一路”这个拗口的名称，但北京方面提到丝绸之路其实是精明之举，因为如果我们的祖先在400年前能努力建立更好的连通性，我们今天没理由不能再次做到。与上述三个国内引擎相比，这个引擎肯定需要等更长时间才能为中国创造增长，但丝路战略将对全球产生最显著的长期影响，因为该战略可能会让全球经济的连通性超越当前的水平、释放出全球经济的“连通性价值”。通过商品、资本、技术、人员、信息、安全、甚至思维方式的流动，全球化世界实现了互联互通。除了为中国和其他相关国家带来经济增长外，北京方面推出的一带一路战略还可以显著地重新定义并扩大这种连通性。

8月11日，人民币转向更直接的、基于市场的汇率形成机制，这种模式转换将在中期内进一步加强中国与全球其他地区的连通性，特别是与中国贸易联系最紧密的东亚国家。尽管人民币汇率在短期内波动性加剧（尤其是人民币兑美元汇率，与此前受到更严格管制、盯住美元的汇率制度相比），但随着中国央行(PBoC)降低干预水平，这种连通性的加强会越来越明显。

8月份中国政府欲管理国内股市，但明显处理不当。幸运的是，中国股市规模只相当于美国股市的一小部分，对大多数中国投资者、中国实体经济或全球经济影响很小。中国经济基本面要重要得多，而它们继续走强，在上述四个引擎的拉动下，中国经济也将继续强劲增长。

Kevin Lu博士为全球私募股权公司合众集团(Partners Group)董事总经理

译者/何黎