Читать книгу Growing Beyond the Low-Cost Advantage - Yiping Huang - Страница 8

Economic performance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been spectacular over the last 3 decades. GDP growth has averaged about 10% per year and per capita income increased by a factor of 13. Rapid growth has led to significant improvement in human wellbeing and the quality of life. From the early 1980s to late 2000s, the incidence of poverty at $1.25-a-day declined from 85% to about 13%, life expectancy at birth increased from 67 to 73 years, and child mortality under the age of 5 years declined from 65 to 18 deaths per 1,000. Economic expansion has also led to a sharp rise in the country’s influence on the global economy. The PRC is now the world’s largest exporter and the second largest economy.

This success can be attributed to three key drivers—market-oriented reform, low-cost advantage, and the role of government—along with other supporting factors. Market-oriented reform has unleashed powerful economic incentives and improved the efficiency of resource allocation and utilization. The liberalization of foreign trade and investment has given PRC firms access to the global market, external capital, advanced technologies and management know-how. The economy’s low-cost advantage, due largely to a vast pool of surplus rural labor, has made the manufacturing sector globally competitive. The government’s active role in development has helped address problems often associated with market failure—such as information and coordination externalities typical of structural transformation in developing countries. Other supporting factors include high savings and investment, major improvements in infrastructure, a young and educated labor force and the associated demographic dividend, and macroeconomic and social stability.

The PRC’s impressive achievements, however, should not make one lose sight of the major challenges it faces. With a per capita gross national income (GNI) of $4,930 in 2011, the PRC has just passed the threshold of upper-middle-income status and it still has a long way to go before becoming a high-income country. But with rising wages and population aging, growth will have to be increasingly driven by productivity improvement through innovation and industrial upgrading—the PRC needs to move from a low-cost to a high-value economy. Moreover, rapid growth has exposed several structural problems, in particular, economic imbalances, rising inequality, resource constraints, and environmental degradation. To some extent these are often associated with rapid structural transformation, but incomplete reform is also a major contributing factor. If not addressed, these problems could hinder PRC’s efforts in moving toward a high-value economy and increase the risk of getting caught in what is increasingly known as the “middle-income trap.”