The Unbound Economy
¿Es China realmente inmune a la crisis?
Kenneth Rogoff
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CAMBRIDGE – En su discurso en el Foro Económico Anual de Davos, Suiza, el Primer Ministro chino Wen Jiabao explicó los planes de su gobierno para contrarrestar la crisis económica global con gasto público y préstamos. Casi garantizó que el crecimiento anual de China seguiría por sobre el 8% en 2009. Sus palabras fueron como un masaje para el público de líderes políticos y de los negocios, paralizados y con los sentidos entumecidos por la recesión.
Sin embargo, ¿tiene realmente el gobierno chino las herramientas necesarias para mantener su economía en un estado tan resistente? Quizás, pero se trata de algo nada de obvio.
La cada vez más grave recesión de Estados Unidos está golpeando el sector exportador de China, así como a todo el resto de Asia. El problema inmediato es una gran escasez de crédito, no tanto en China como en Estados Unidos y Europa, donde muchos importadores pequeños y de tamaño medio no pueden obtener los créditos comerciales que necesitan para comprar productos al exterior.
Como resultado, algunas áreas costeras de China que antes bullían de actividad hoy lucen como ciudades fantasmas, ya que decenas de miles de trabajadores despedidos han hecho las maletas y vuelvo a sus pueblos del interior. De manera similar, quizás la mitad de los 200 a 300 mil habitantes del barrio coreano de Beijing, principalmente trabajadores (y sus familias) pagados por compañías coreanas que fabrican en China productos para exportación, se han marchado a casa.
Con cerca de 2 billones de dólares en reservas en moneda extranjera, los chinos tienen los recursos para financiar un gran aumento del gasto público y ayudar a respaldar los préstamos bancarios. Muchos de los principales investigadores chinos están convencidos de que el gobierno hará lo que sea para mantener el crecimiento por sobre el 8%. Sin embargo, esto no viene gratis. Incluso si tiene éxito en el corto plazo, es casi seguro que este enorme paso hacia el gasto público producirá índices de crecimiento significativamente más lentos en unos cuantos años más.
En pocas palabras, está lejos de ser claro el que valga la pena construir proyectos de infraestructura marginal, considerando que China ya está invirtiendo más del 45% de su ingreso, y gran parte de eso ya es en infraestructura. Es cierto que parte del estímulo fiscal de China consiste en préstamos al sector privado a través del sector bancario, altamente controlado. Sin embargo, ¿hay alguna razón para creer que los nuevos préstamos se destinen a proyectos que merezcan la pena, en lugar de a prestatarios que cuenten con conexiones políticas?
De hecho, hasta ahora el éxito de China se ha basado en un equilibrio entre el gobierno y la expansión del sector privado. Elevar grandemente el ya sobredimensionado perfil del gobierno en la economía alterará este delicado equilibrio, produciendo un crecimiento más lento en el futuro.
Sería preferible para China encontrar una manera de reemplazar la demanda de consumo privado estadounidense por una demanda interna, pero el sistema parece incapaz de avanzar rápidamente en esa dirección. Si la inversión del gobierno ha de ser el vehículo principal, sería mucho mejor construir escuelas y hospitales, que se necesitan con enorme urgencia, a construir "puentes hacia ningún sitio”, como hiciera Japón cuando siguió un curso de acción similar en los años 90. Lamentablemente, los funcionarios locales chinos necesitan destacarse en el “campeonato del crecimiento” del país para ser ascendidos. Las escuelas y hospitales no generan el tipo de rápido ingreso por impuestos y aumento del PGB que necesitan para parecer más eficaces que sus rivales políticos.
Antes incluso del comienzo de la recesión global, había fuertes razones para dudar de la sostenibilidad del paradigma de crecimiento de China. La degradación del medio ambiente es evidente, incluso para observadores circunstanciales. Y los inversionistas han comenzado a calcular que si China prosiguiera con su prodigioso ritmo de crecimiento, pronto ocuparía una proporción demasiado grande de la economía global como para mantener su reciente trayectoria exportadora, por lo que de todas maneras era inevitable tener que recurrir a un mayor consumo interno. La recesión global simplemente ha adelantado un par de años el problema.
No deja de ser interesante el que EE.UU. enfrente retos similares. Durante años, logró un crecimiento rápido desviando la atención que exigía una variedad de problemas, desde el medio ambiente a la infraestructura y la salud. Incluso si no se hubiera producido la crisis financiera, abordar las carencias en estas áreas probablemente hubiera reducido el ritmo de crecimiento estadounidense.
No estamos diciendo con eso que Estados y China sean lo mismo. Uno de los grandes retos del futuro es encontrar una manera de alinear los ahorros de ambos países, considerando los vastos desequilibrios comerciales que, según muchos, sembraron las semillas de la crisis financiera.
Hace poco este desafío se me vino a la mente cuando un investigador chino explicó que en China los hombres sienten que deben ahorrar para encontrar una novia. La misma semana, uno de mis ex estudiantes, que perdió su lucrativo empleo en el sector financiero me explicó que no tenía ahorros... ¡porque era demasiado caro salir con una chica en Nueva York! El tipo de cambio entre el dólar y el yuan tiene poco que ver con estas diferencias sociales, pero también las termina afectando.
De una manera u otra, es probable que la crisis financiera reduzca significativamente el ritmo de crecimiento de China en el mediano plazo. Sin embargo, ¿tendrán éxito sus líderes en estabilizar la situación en el corto plazo? Espero que sí, pero me sentiría más convencido con un plan que pusiera más énfasis en promover el consumo privado interno, la salud y la educación, en lugar de la misma estrategia de crecimiento de los últimos 30 años.
Kenneth Rogoff es profesor de Economía y Políticas públicas de la Universidad de Harvard, y fue economista en jefe del FMI.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org
Traducido del inglés por David Meléndez Tormen
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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.