中印经济奇迹丰富增长理论

COMMENTS ON MARTIN WOLF'S CHINDIA - JEFFREY FRANKEL







Jeffrey Frankel

Friday, April 13, 2007







It is indeed extraordinary that a pair of countries that not long ago were the world's biggest economic laggards are now the world's biggest engines of growth.

The recent developments, including the evidence cited in the Bosworth-Collins paper and Martin Wolf's column, shed light on some of the most important questions in growth theory.

The first question is the hypothesis of Alwyn Young, popularized in Paul Krugman's famous article “The Myth of the Asian Economic Miracle,” that the success of Asian countries was mostly based on force-fed capital accumulation, and that it would therefore run into diminishing returns, as opposed to growth in total factor productivity (TFP). (The latter might, in turn, be attributed for example to catchup with the West, or else to something called Asian values.) Apparently capital accumulation explains only roughly half the economic miracles on China and India. The rest is TFP after all, though liberalization seems a more likely explanation for it than Asian culture.









美国哈佛大学教授杰弗里•弗兰克尔(Jeffrey Frankel)为英国《金融时报》撰稿

2007年4月13日 星期五







不久以前，中国和印度还是世界上两个最大的经济落后国家，如今却成了推动全球经济增长的大国，这的确非同寻常。

近来的一些进展——包括博斯沃思-柯林斯(Bosworth-Collins)报告和马丁•沃尔夫(Martin Wolf)专栏中提到的迹象——都清楚地表明了增长理论中一些最为重要的问题。

第一个问题是阿尔文•杨(Alwyn Young)的假设——这一假设在保罗•克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)的著名文章《亚洲经济奇迹的神话》(The Myth of the Asian Economic Miracle)中得以广为人知。假设内容是，亚洲国家的成功在很大程度上是基于迫不得已的资本积累，因而将转化为收益递减，而非总体要素生产率(TFP)的增长。（随之而来的情况要么是赶上西方，要么是产生某种被称为亚洲价值观的东西。）显然，资本积累只能为中国和印度的经济奇迹提供一半左右的解释。剩下的还是要由TFP来解释，尽管与亚洲文化相比，自由化似乎是一种更为合理的解释。

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