The Unbound Economy
La Chine est-elle vraiment à l’abri de la crise ?
Kenneth Rogoff
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CAMBRIDGE – En s’adressant au Forum économique mondial annuel de Davos, en Suisse, le Premier ministre chinois Wen Jiabao a détaillé le plan de son gouvernement pour contrer la débâcle économique mondiale au moyen de dépenses et de prêts publics. Il a plus ou moins garanti que la croissance annuelle de la Chine se maintiendrait au-dessus de 8 pour cent en 2009. Les dirigeants économiques et politiques mondiaux, sonnés par la crise, buvaient ses paroles comme du petit lait.
Mais le gouvernement chinois a-t-il vraiment les moyens de maintenir son économie à flot ? Peut-être, mais c’est loin d’être évident.
L’aggravation de la récession aux Etats-Unis a frappé le secteur des exportations chinoises de plein fouet, comme partout ailleurs en Asie. Le problème immédiat est la contraction du crédit, pas tant en Chine qu’aux Etats-Unis et en Europe, qui empêche de nombreux importateurs de petite et moyenne taille d’accéder aux crédits dont ils ont besoin pour acheter leur stock à l’étranger.
En conséquence, certaines zones côtières de la Chine, autrefois florissantes, ressemblent aujourd’hui à des villes fantômes et des dizaines de milliers de travailleurs sont repartis dans leur village. A Beijing aussi, le quartier coréen, qui abritait quelques 250.000 habitants – principalement des travailleurs (et leurs familles) rémunérés par des société coréennes produisant en Chine des biens à l’export – a vu près de la moitié des familles retourner en Corée du Sud.
Avec 2000 milliards de dollars de réserves de change, la Chine a largement les moyens de financier des accroissements massifs des dépenses gouvernementales et de prêter en dernier recours aux banques. Plusieurs chercheurs chinois de premier plan sont convaincus que le gouvernement fera tout en son pouvoir pour maintenir la croissance au-dessus de 8 pour cent. Mais il y a un hic. Même si elle rencontre un succès à court terme, la transition substantielle vers une augmentation des dépenses publiques se traduira tôt ou tard par une baisse du taux de croissance dans les années à venir.
Pour le dire simplement, il n’est pas évident que les projets d’infrastructures mineures vaillent la peine d’être construits, étant donné que la Chine investit déjà plus de 45 pour cent de ses revenus, dont une grande partie dans les infrastructures. Il est vrai qu’une partie des incitations fiscales chinoises prévoit d’accorder des prêts au secteur privé par l’entremise du secteur bancaire, étroitement contrôlé. Mais comment savoir si ces nouveaux prêts iront aux projets qui en vaillent la peine ou à des emprunteurs ayant les bonnes relations politiques ?
En fait, le succès économique de la Chine repose sur le maintien d’un équilibre entre le gouvernement et un secteur privé en expansion. Renforcer fortement la présence déjà excessive du gouvernement dans l’économie détruira cet équilibre délicat et entraînera une croissance plus faible à l’avenir.
Il serait préférable que la Chine trouve le moyen de remplacer la consommation privée américaine par une consommation intérieure, mais son système économique ne semble pas capable d’une transition rapide dans ce sens. Si les dépenses publiques doivent être le vecteur de la reprise, il vaudrait mieux alors que le gouvernement investisse dans des écoles et des hôpitaux plutôt que dans des « ponts vers nulle part », comme l’a fait le Japon, confronté aux mêmes problèmes dans les années 1990. Malheureusement, les responsables locaux chinois doivent exceller dans la « compétition de la croissance » du pays pour être promus. Les écoles et les hôpitaux ne génèrent pas le genre de revenu fiscal rapide qui permet de supplanter ses rivaux politiques.
Avant même le début de la récession mondiale, il y avait plusieurs bonnes raisons de douter de la durabilité du modèle de croissance chinois. La dégradation de l’environnement est évidente, même pour des visiteurs de passage. Et les économistes ont calculé que si la Chine continue à afficher un taux de croissance aussi prodigieux, elle occupera bientôt une proportion telle de l’économie mondiale qu’elle ne pourra pas maintenir son niveau d’exportations actuel. Une transition vers le développement de la consommation intérieure était de toute façon inévitable – la récession mondiale n’a fait que mettre le problème en lumière quelques années plus tôt.
Il est intéressant de noter que les Etats-Unis sont confrontés à des défis similaires. Pendant des années, les États-Unis ont profité d’une forte croissance en repoussant à plus tard l’examen de certains problèmes, que ce soit l’environnement, les infrastructures ou l’assurance maladie. Même sans la crise financière, s’attaquer à la résolution de ces questions aurait sans doute ralenti la croissance américaine.
Ce n’est pas pour autant que les Etats-Unis et la Chine sont dans la même situation. L’une des grandes difficultés futures sera de trouver le moyen d’aligner l’épargne de ces deux pays, compte tenu des graves déséquilibres commerciaux qui, de l’avis de certains, sont à l’origine de la crise financière.
Cette question m’est récemment revenue à l’esprit lorsqu’un chercheur chinois m’a expliqué que les Chinois se sentent aujourd’hui obligés d’épargner pour trouver une épouse. La même semaine, un de mes anciens étudiants, qui venait de perdre un emploi lucratif dans le secteur de la finance, m’a raconté qu’il n’avait pas un sou d’économie parce que ça coûtait les yeux de la tête de sortir avec quelqu’un à New York ! Ces différences sociales et culturelles n’ont pas grand rapport avec le taux de change entre le yuan et le dollar, qui a malgré tout aussi son importance.
D’une manière ou d’une autre, la crise financière devrait nettement ralentir la croissance à moyen terme de la Chine. Mais ses dirigeants parviendront-ils à stabiliser la situation au court terme ? Je l’espère, mais j’aurais été plus convaincu par un plan de relance qui privilégie la consommation intérieure, la santé et l’éducation qu’un plan basé sur la même stratégie de croissance que celle des trente dernières années.
Kenneth Rogoff, ancien économiste en chef du FMI, est professeur d’économie et de politiques publiques à l’université de Harvard.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
www.project-syndicate.org
Traduit de l’anglais par Julia Gallin
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tvselvakumaran 01:54 20 Feb 09
Professor Rogoff is right when he points out several shortcomings of the Chinese model of economic growth. However, it is only in the long-term (over 12 years) that the Chinese model is quite suspect. The main problem with the Chinese economy, in the long-term, is that its demographics is not favorable to its growth. Having pursued a one-child policy officially for several decades now, China finds that its demographic profile is skewing more and more towards an aging population. The second problem is that with a communist political framework firmly in place, China's economy is going to encounter serious difficulties when it graduates, in the coming years, from an economy based on manufacturing to one that is based on services and information, and further on towards an innovation-based economy. The third problem, which Professor Rogoff also mentions, is that there needs to be a serious alternative for exports, as an engine of economic growth. Relying only on exports for achieving rapid economic growth is an unsustainable policy in the long-term. The majority of China's population is poor, and lives in rural areas with inadequate infrastructure. The consumer demand among this section of China's population should rise fast enough to offset the slowing of China's export growth. This is a very challenging goal indeed.
In the short term (0 - 4 years), thanks to the freebies handed out by the American intellectual establishment, it seems quite certain that the Chinese economy is poised for 8%+ growth of annual GDP in real terms (i.e., after correcting for inflation). These freebies are mainly in the form of lax monetary policy and excess domestic spending -- 4 trillion dollars and counting -- in America, and are meant to ward off the ill-effects of voodoo spirits on the American economy and to suffuse it with animal spirits instead. This reckless spending has empowered China to announce its own two-year spending program, for an amount of 586 billion dollars at current exchange rates. As Premier Wen Jiabao explained at the World Economic Forum on January 28, because the Chinese government has carefully chosen to spend this money mainly on the poorest areas in China, one could expect that this spending would result in a dollar-for-dollar impact on the GDP, which, by itself, would ensure an 8%+ GDP growth for the next two years. Moreover, since China's own housing industry and its finance industry have not been seriously affected by the recent financial crisis in America, the Chinese government is free to focus its spending program to get the maximum effect for its money. Moreover, with over 2 trillion dollars of reserves, China's economy has already produced the resources in the past, that are required to finance this new fiscal spending program of the next two-years, and even further to six or seven years into the future. In addition, the phenomenal savings rate of Chinese families ensures that China need not worry at all about financing its deficit spending, unlike the United States. Most importantly, China can carry out this $586-billion spending program in the next two-years, and still engineer a mild appreciation of its currency against the US dollar, in case there are any complaints that it is manipulating its currency to keep it artificially depreciated.
In the medium term (4 - 12 years), the picture is less clear, only because the freebies handed out to China could lead to a protectionist backlash in Western economies. Nevertheless, the continuation of the 8%+ growth path seems a very real possibility for China. As such, the GDP of the United States for 2007 was about 14 trillion dollars, and that of China was 3.5 trillion dollars (in nominal terms). So, provided that the Chinese government does not get involved recklessly in any unilateral military adventures, there seems to be room for a doubling or a tripling of China's nominal GDP in the next 12 years. In any case, the Chinese intellectual establishment appears to have taken to some such forecast with a mission-critical focus, and is surely going to employ all its resources towards achieving that target. Broadly, two scenarios are possible in the medium-term.
Scenario I: There could be a re-enactment of the run-up to the East Asia crisis of 1997. Please recall that during the recession of 1990-91 also, the banking system in America was mired in a serious crisis -- the Savings & Loan crisis. The losses in this crisis extended to hundreds of billions of dollars. To ease the pain caused by failed property loans, the US Federal Reserve pumped huge amounts of liquidity into the US economy in the early 90s. With money available so freely at so low interest rates, investors and fund managers were looking for new avenues of investment that would beat the creeping inflation. At this point in time, the Latin American countries had already been bankrupted in the previous decade due to high volatility in the interest rates that the Fed under Paul Volcker had set to combat the high inflation of the 70s. So, this time, the American financial industry had to look to far off East Asia which had been demonstrating rapid economic growth for 20 years or so by then. In the five year period, 1988 - 1993, the market capitalization in all of East Asia had leapt 10-fold to over $870 billion. This inflow of dollars would only accelerate after 1993. With risk premia down to an absolute minimum, there was a super-charged, manic environment where billion-dollar deals were frequently done in minutes. Unfortunately, the East Asian and Chinese economies were not mature enough to present shovel-ready infrastructure projects or hand out consumer loans in the massive scale that the inflow of dollars demanded. So, the situation became inherently unsustainable.
By the mid-90s, the technology boom back in the US took off in earnest. The low-priced Chinese manufactured goods kept inflation very low, so that the American economy could function at rates well below the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). These factors enabled a sustained technology boom, which in turn provided a viable alternative for the dollars that were flowing into East Asia. Hence there was a sudden flight of massive amounts of capital out of East Asia. Though the East Asian countries had built up large reserves of foreign exchange, they could not handle this sudden and drastic outflow of dollars. The Thai baht was the first to devalue, forcing Thailand to default on its debt in 1997. The financial contagion spread to the rest of the East Asian countries one-by-one, putting an end to the 25-year economic boom in this region.
Fast-forward to 2009. The Fed has cut interest rates to the minimum possible range. There is a flood of liquidity in the economy. After two more years of fiscal spending, it could happen that the US government has succeeded in preventing prolonged deflation, and has gotten the economy out of recession but only into a mild recovery. Serious long-term prospects for economic growth are nowhere to be seen, even in the alternative energy sector or the hi-tech sector. So, once again money, in search of better returns than treasury securities, heads out to the fast-growing economies of China and East Asia. However, this time around, the American financial system has been taking massive losses in the mortgage crisis. So, there is going to be a steady stream instead of a flood. For their part, the economies of China and East Asia are much more mature now and would probably be able to absorb the inflow of a trillion or two of capital from the United States.
There is also an in-built stabilizer in this scenario. If the Fed resorts to a monetary policy that is too lax, and the politicians resort to protectionist backlash, then this would result in an all-too-rapid slowdown of exports from China. In return, China could abandon the US dollar, and finance its domestic spending program by printing more of its own currency. This would result in a race to the bottom. On the other hand, if the Fed, the US government and the private sector work in close co-ordination with China, then the American finance industry could get good returns on its capital investments in China. These rates of return would probably be high enough to offset the negative impact of inflation which could creep up anytime after this year. These returns, in combination with the alternative energy sector and hi-tech sector, could provide the foundations for robust economic growth in America for the next decade or so. Moreover, America could export millions of its citizen to China and East Asia as consultants in business, politics and as teachers of the English language.
Scenario II: A group of proximate countries either from Africa, Latin America or Eastern Europe could give China a run for its money, as the manufacturing capital of the world. With the United States spending trillions of dollars to upgrade its infrastructure and to shore up its own manufacturing base, this new group could negotiate an effective partnership with America, and possibly also with the European Union, to successfully keep out Chinese goods from Western markets. If this situation is achieved purely through more efficient production processes and not through any protectionist backlash, then China would have no choice but to rely solely on its internal demand to sustain rapid GDP growth. However, one should note that the emergence of such a competitor group would take at least a decade. In the cases of the East Asian Tigers, China and Japan, each of these economies had been growing rapidly for 20 years or more, before they were considered as serious threats to the world order existing then. Hence this scenario seems less likely to occur in the medium term than Scenario I.