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从依赖债务推增长转向依靠净股权资产创增值

May 31, 2016 Andrew Sheng , Xiao Geng

香港— 诸多最新评论警告中国债务激增，从2008年占GDP的148%增加到2015年三季度末的249%。许多人焦虑地指出，中国债务已经堪与欧盟（占GDP的270%）和美国（占GDP的248%）相当。他们的担忧正确吗？

在某种程度上是正确的。但尽管观察家们的担心并非完全毫无根据，敲响系统风险警报仍为时尚早。最新的汇丰银行报告指出，近期中国债务的迅速积累主要集中在公司和地方政府层面，整体情况并不像许多人所认为的那样危险。

首先，中国有非常高的储蓄率——在过去十年中超过45%，远远高于发达经济体——这使得它能够维持较高的债务水平。此外，中国银行系统仍是家庭部门储蓄的主要渠道，这意味着这些储蓄通过银行贷款支持公司投资，而不是用于股权融资（股权融资只占净投资的5%左右）。事实上，债务占GDP之比的上升有相当部分可归因于中国股权资本市场的相对不发达。

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Andrew Sheng

Writing for PS since 2011
83 Commentaries

Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His latest book is From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.

Xiao Geng

Writing for PS since 2012
74 Commentaries

Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, is a professor at Peking University HSBC Business School and at the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Business and Economics.

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Godfree Roberts Jun 4, 2016

China aims to raise the real wages of its people through increasing labour productivity and lowering the cost
of living. This is achieved by investment and an organisation of resources that makes the whole greater than
the sum of its parts.
Infrastructure is at the core. Beginning on the east coast, China’s infrastructure has made it the pre-eminent
manufacturing economy in the world. Increasingly, infrastructure serves to lower living costs through urbanisation and distribution. In this way, it drives both increased consumption but also, importantly, increased levels of equality.
And by the power of networks, the more infrastructure China produces, the greater the benefit.
The challenge, of course, is delivering the right outcomes. Here China seems to understand that profit maximising at the firm level cannot lead to an optimal economy-wide outcome. In some instances, this means using natural monopolies for social rather than financial gain. In others, it means cross-subsidisation. While in others, it means producing some of the most competitive markets in the world, where excess returns are non-existent.
Failure is, in many ways, a feature rather than a bug. It represents both innovation and rejuvenation:
evident in high speed rail, ultra-high voltage and, for failure, the ghost cities. It will allow industries to rise
and, in turn, fall: the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late nineties, textiles and coal. Tomorrow it
may be trust products.
Yes, there are challenges: property and debt. But these fragilities are over-stated. They do not threaten
the model.
The proof is in the numbers. Not just headline growth, but stable and low inflation, strong wage growth and
rising tax revenue. The St Louis Federal Reserve estimate that the multiplier on Chinese government spending
is two. The economy is creating surplus capital to replace that which is destroyed. Finally, there are exports.
Exports validate internal data: China is taking global market share and prices are falling even as wages and
currency rise. What’s happening externally is surely happening internally.
Like the United States before it, the entry of China into the international economy has raised, in aggregate, living standards globally. The productivity improvement has made available to even more the benefits of manufactured technologies. But rather than being a Golden Goose, China is a deflationary force. A great destroyer of capital.
The challenge for the developed world is to harness this engine of productivity, not to work against it. It’s the
same for financial markets.
Simply, the largest population on earth, pursuing a radical investment in public goods with near perfectly
competitive goods markets was always going to change the world. It’s just a matter of how….Its approach to investment fits in the broad Asian model. There’s significant direction: the Chinese leadership believes that much of the decision making around certain investment, infrastructure for instance, should occur in the absence of a market. Yet, it uses the market in sectors where the market creates the best outcomes, such as consumer goods and services. In this way, China encourages a disaggregated economy with the shared, network investment these firms rely upon…This paper will argue that it is China’s investment approach that drives its economic stability. If there is going to be a transition to a higher level of relative consumption in the near future, this will be because investment, and investment alone, has made it so. To rebalance the economy in favor of consumption through a reversal of current policy would be a terrible mistake. It would exacerbate rising levels of inequality and foster the type of entrenched inflation that besets emerging markets. http://www.cfsgam.com.au/au/insto/Insights/How_investment_transformed_China/
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Jose araujo Jun 2, 2016

Does it even matter? I honestly don't get the point or the difference between direct investment (equity) or going to a bank and borrowing money to invest.

In the end its the same thing and one of the great inventions from man is that saving and investing can be done by different agents.
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Michael Public May 31, 2016

Overall China is a creditor country. Any debt internally between banks and corporations is effectively 'eliminated on consolidation' to use an accounting term.
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