中国经济发展开始进入“刘易斯转折点”，中国的经济结构将如何调整？人口增长和创新技术将在经济变革中扮演何种角色？中国经济增长放缓对澳洲经济有何影响？
澳洲会计师公会资深经济学家Bryce Prosser撰文分析了这些议题，原汁原味阅读英文原版：
Is China's boom ending?
As it nears the Lewis Turning Point, China finds itself in need of major economic changes
You may have seen recent comments in the media discussing the economic slowdown in China and the global impact it will have, especially on Australia. As with most stories about China, the story isn’t as simple as it first appears.
Unfortunately, China’s slowdown cannot simply be thought of as the same as an economic slowdown in Australia. The difference is that China’s changes are structural and relate to a phrase that will become increasingly common in articles on China – the Lewis Turning Point.
So what is the Lewis Turning Point and what does it mean? To explain, it is important to look at China’s rise to become the world’s second-largest economy and its prolific economic growth over the past few decades.
The rise and rise of China
Since China opened up to foreign trade and investment and implemented its free markets reforms in 1979, it has been among the world’s fastest growing economies, averaging incredible economic growth of around 10 per cent a year. Economists largely put forward two factors that have driven China’s economic success: firstly, large-scale capital investment, such as roads, ports and power generation; secondly, significant productivity growth. It is this second factor that provides some insight into the current slowdown and why it is so critical.
Let me explain by using China’s agricultural reforms as an example. If we look at productivity, it relates to the best use of a resource, be that a building, machine or the available workforce.
When China introduced its economic reforms in 1979, it introduced price and ownership incentives for farmers that enabled them to sell a portion of their crops on the free market.This enabled greater production to occur, greater efficiencies, and lowered the demand for agricultural workers. The result was a huge supply of excess rural workers who could now seek work in the more productive manufacturing sector. This significant supply of cheap labour has been the engine room of China’s low inflation economic growth model for the past 35 years. And it has worked.
Demographics will play a major role in China’s slowdown
Just as China’s massive supply of cheap rural labour has allowed it to grow, it is also the limiting factor that will signal its slowdown. In the not-too-distant future, China is poised to undergo a profound demographic shift driven largely by an ageing population, the result of China’s one-child policy, and continued declining fertility. The United Nations has projected that in China, the growth of the working-age population (aged between 15 and 64) will turn negative around 2019-2020.
As the country’s working population declines, so too will the supply of labour. Reaching this stage is called the Lewis Turning Point - the point where China moves from having a vast supply of low-cost workers to one where it is faced with a labour shortage. What this will mean for China is that as the supply of workers falls, manufacturers and others sectors will compete for workers, driving up labour costs which will flow through to higher prices, higher incomes and lower corporate profits in China. This change will also have a major impact on China’s trading partners. China will need to act now to change its economic model if it is to continue to see strong growth going forward.
The risk of the ‘middle-income trap’ for China
Over this period of historic growth, China has largely relied on adopting western technologies to develop its industries and products, rather than investing in innovation, which is one of the key drivers of growth for developed economies. Once the Lewis Turning Point is reached and labour costs and prices start to rise, the challenge for China will be its ability to develop new products and smarter ways of production and marketing to compete on a global stage.
If China is unable to do this it is highly likely that it may fall victim to what is known as the “middle income trap”, where a country has grown rapidly based on low labour costs, as China has, but then fails to move to a high-income developed economy as there are barriers stopping it from making gains through innovation and productivity. This sounds simple to fix but success in making this transition has proven extremely difficult.
The Lewis Turning Point is where China moves from having a vast supply of low-cost workers to one where it is faced with a labour shortage.
According to the World Bank, of the 101 countries that were classified as middle-income in 1960, only 13 had reached “high-income” status by 2008. This will be the major challenge facing China over the next decade and without further and significant structural reforms we may be seeing an end to China’s sensational growth of the past 35 years.
What will these changes mean for Australia?
As has been recently reported in the press, when China slows the effects are felt around the world. China has become such a large importer of goods and raw materials that any weakness in demand is seen quickly in its trading partners. For Australia the main impact is on the mining sector and its support industries. To put this in context, China currently consumes around half of the world’s iron ore and coal supply and between 30 to 40 per cent of global production of base metals such as copper. Given Australia’s mining-led growth over the past decade, any slowdown in China, or even the prospect of a decrease in Chinese demand, can and has had a major impact on Australia. How far and how long this will last will in a large part be up to the Chinese and what action they take to ensure that it does not fall into the middle income trap like so many other developing countries before it.
Bryce Prosser is CPA Australia’s Senior Economist
原文出处：
http://www.itbdigital.com/opinion/2013/08/07/is-chinas-boom-ending/
欢迎关注澳洲会计师公会上海办事处
微信订阅号: cpaaustraliashanghai
