China is a case in point. With its current-account surplus averaging 5.5% of GDP in 2000-2008, China has become one of the world’s largest lenders. Despite its rapid growth and promising investment opportunities, the country has persistently been sending a significant portion of its savings overseas.
And China is not alone. Other emerging markets – including Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, Argentina, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Middle Eastern oil exporters – have all increased their current-account surpluses significantly since the early 1990’s. Collectively, capital-scarce developing countries are lending to capital-abundant advanced economies.
Many observers believe that these global imbalances reflect developing economies’ financial integration, coupled with underdevelopment of domestic financial markets. According to this view, these countries’ demand for assets cannot be met – in terms of both quantity and quality – at home, so they deploy part of their savings to countries like the US, which can offer a more diverse array of quality assets.
While plausible, this argument suggests that, as financial markets improve over time in developing countries, the global imbalances are bound to shrink. But such a reversal is nowhere in sight. Why?
A crucial dimension of globalization has been trade liberalization. For China, foreign trade as a percentage of GDP soared from 25% in 1989 to 66% in 2006, largely owing to its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Most of what China and other developing countries produce and export are labor-intensive goods such as textiles and apparel. This has allowed advanced economies, in turn, to produce and export more capital-intensive, higher-value-added products. Globalization of trade enabled countries to tap the efficiency gains that specialization in their sectors of comparative advantage has brought about.
With a slight mental stretch, one can imagine that what a country produces and trades may affect its savings and investment decisions. An economy in which the main productive activity is berry picking, for example, has little need for investment and capital accumulation. Its laborers earn wages, consume, and save part of that income. Since the production process requires little capital, there is no demand for domestic investment – and thus no savings vehicles. Instead, the only way to save is by purchasing capital abroad – in economies with capital-intensive production and demand for investment. This economy will always export its savings.
That may be an extreme example, but it illustrates a more general point about how merchandise trade can influence financial flows. Countries that produce and export more labor-intensive goods – perhaps owing to increased trade openness, or faster labor-force and productivity growth, all of which are true of China – may experience a rise in saving, but a less-than-equivalent increase in demand for capital.
Rich countries, by contrast, are able to export more capital-intensive goods, and thus have a greater need for investment. So they may be importing more capital – resulting in a greater current-account deficit – simply because they are producing more capital-intensive goods.
With developing countries – in particular, China, India, and the ex-Soviet bloc – bringing almost 1.5 billion workers into the world economy since the early 1990’s, it is not difficult to understand the potential impact of this effect. After all, much of this labor force was absorbed by labor-intensive industries that eventually churned out products exported to the rest of the world. Indeed, that massive addition of labor helped to drive down the relative price of labor-intensive goods, which fell by roughly 15% between 1989 and 2008.
As developing countries increased their labor-intensive production and exports, their current-account surpluses rose – by almost 3.6 percentage points, on average, between 1989-1993 and 2002-2006. China’s current-account surplus increased by almost 11 percentage points over the same period, India’s by 2.5 percentage points, and Russia’s by seven percentage points. These countries, as well as other large surplus economies, such as Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, all experienced a simultaneous increase in the labor content of exports.
This pattern contrasts with that of the United States and many other advanced countries, which have experienced a deterioration of their current-account balances as their production and exports have become more capital-intensive.
Many might doubt the view that China is exporting more labor-intensive goods, rather than upgrading its exports on the capital- and skill-intensity ladder. But trade data suggest the opposite, perhaps because China’s accession to the WTO led to tariff reductions that released more labor-intensive production.
In fact, trade data may underestimate the true extent of China’s labor intensity and overstate the capital and skill intensity of China’s exports. China has witnessed rapid growth in the processing trade: assembling intermediate inputs – imported from countries like the US and Japan – that have high capital and skill content. So, while the exports of these final goods may count towards China’s own capital and skill content, the country’s real role was only in the labor-intensive process of assembly.
A country’s production structure may very well determine how much capital it supplies and how much it needs. So the fact that capital may flow towards rich countries that produce and export more capital-intensive goods should not be so puzzling, after all.
Keyu Jin is Lecturer in Economics at the London
School
of Economics.
Keyu Jin: 中國資金為何流向富裕國家？
倫敦——起初似乎很難理解全球資本為什麼會從窮國倒流向富國。新興市場國家普遍錄得經常賬戶盈余，而發達經濟體則錄得赤字。年輕的發展中國家增長速度快，資本匱乏，按常理他們本該從其他國家進口資金以支持金融消費和投資。那麼為什麼事實卻恰恰相反，他們在向富裕國家進行資本輸出？
中國就是一個很好的例子。中國的經常賬戶盈余在2000－2008年間平均達到5.5%，已經成為全世界最大的貸款國之一。盡管投資機會誘人、經濟也快速成長，中國卻一直將很大一部分儲蓄向海外輸出。
中國的情況並非個例。包括巴西、俄羅斯、印度、墨西哥、阿根廷、泰國、印尼、馬來西亞和中東石油出口國在內的其他新興市場經常賬戶盈余自20世紀90年代初起就顯著增加。資金匱乏的發展中國家向資金充裕的發達國家放貸成為一種集體現象。
很多觀察家認為這樣的全球失衡反映了發展中國家金融一體化的現狀，以及國內金融市場還很不成熟。按照此類說法，這些國家對資產的需求（無論從數量還是質量上）都無法在國內得到滿足，因此他們隻得將部分儲蓄配置到以美國為首的國家，因為這些國家擁有更多樣化的優質資產可供選擇。
這種說法雖然有一定道理，但人們因此可以順理成章地認為隨著發展中國家金融市場的逐步發展，全球失衡的現象必然日漸萎縮。但這樣的逆轉似乎還遙遙無期。這又是什麼原因呢？
全球化的一個重要方面是貿易自由化。對中國而言，由於在2001年加入世貿組織，外貿佔其國內生產總值的比重從1989年的25%猛增至2006年的66%。
中國和其他發展中國家生產出口的多數是勞動密集型產品，如紡織品和服裝。發達國家則反過來得以從事資本更密集、附加值更高的生產活動。貿易全球化使各國能充分利用專注於比較優勢領域所帶來的效率回報。
稍微發揮一下想象力就不難想見，一個國家的產品和貿易可能會影響其儲蓄和投資決策。比方說，一個以漿果採摘為主要生產活動的經濟體將鮮有投資和資本積累的需求。那裡的勞動者掙錢、消費，並儲存部分勞動收入。因為簡單的生產過程不需要多少資金，國內的投資需求比較匱乏——因此也沒有多少儲蓄工具可供選擇。相反，唯一的儲蓄方法是向從事資本密集型生產並有投資需求的國家購買外國資本。這樣的國家總會將儲蓄出口。
這或許是個極端的例子，但卻足以証明貿易影響資金流動的普遍原則。像中國這樣生產及出口勞動密集型產品的國家可能因為貿易開放或勞動力及生產率快速增長而出現儲蓄增長，但是對資金的需求卻相對匱乏。
相反，富國則可以出口資本更為密集的產品，因此擁有更為強勁的投資需求。於是他們可能僅僅因為生產資本密集型產品而要進口更多的資金——從而導致經常賬戶赤字的增加。
因為中國、印度、前蘇聯等發展中國家從20世紀90年代初起即攜帶近15億勞動力融入世界經濟，上述效應所產生的潛在影響力並不難想象。畢竟其中多數人被勞動力密集型行業所吸收，批量制造出各種產品出口到世界各國。事實上，這些大幅增加的勞動力壓低了勞動力密集型產品的相對價格，該類產品從1989到2008年間價格降低了約15%。
1989-1993及2002-2006年間，隨著發展中國家加大勞動密集型產品的生產及出口，他們的經常賬戶盈余平均增長了近3.6%。中國同期內經常賬戶盈余增長近11%，印度增長2.5%，而俄羅斯則增長7%。上述國家及巴西、沙特、伊朗等其他大規模盈余經濟體均出現了出口產品勞動力含量同步增長的勢頭。
美國和其他很多發達國家的模式則恰好相反，隨著其國內生產及出口資本密集度的提升，他們的經常賬戶余額均出現了惡化。
中國仍在出口更多勞動密集型產品，而不是提高其出口產品資金和技術密度的說法可能遭致很多人的懷疑。但貿易數據的顯示卻恰恰相反，可能因為中國加入WTO所導致的關稅下降釋放了勞動密集型產業。
事實上，貿易數據可能低估中國真實的勞動力密集度，同時高估資本和技術密集度。中國經歷了加工貿易的飛速發展：組裝從美日等國進口的中間零件，這裡所說的中間零件本身具有較高的資金及技術含量。因此，雖然上述最終產品的出口可能被算做中國自身的資金和技術含量，但勞動密集型的組裝過程才是這個國家所扮演的真正角色。
一個國家的生產結構完全可以決定它所需求和供應的資金數額。因此歸根結底，資金流向生產並出口資金密集型產品的富有國家並沒有什麼值得大驚小怪的。
Keyu
Jin，倫敦經濟學院經濟學講師。
