Hu's counting 胡主席的“小算盘

Hu's counting 胡主席的“小算盘”       

DURING his state visit to America last week, President Hu Jintao of China offered some familiar banalities and worthy pieties, as this week’s Banyan remarks. But he also made a couple of hard, quantitative claims. In a speech on January 20th, President Hu said that cheap inexpensive imports from China had saved American consumers $600 billion over the past decade (2001-2010) and that exports to China had created over 14m jobs around the world.

正如本周经济学人亚洲专栏评价的那样，在上周的美国之行中，中国国家主席胡锦涛像往常一样做了一番充满仁义道德和陈词滥调的致辞。不过这次他还做了点为数不多的强硬声明。在1月20日的演讲中，胡主席宣称，在过去的十年里（2001-2010），从中国进口的廉价商品为美国消费者省下了6000亿美元，而对中国的出口则为世界创造了超过1400万份工作。

Those figures were probably provided by the Ministry of Commerce, but I’ve no idea how they were calculated. (The figure of 14m jobs made an earlier appearance in a 2009 piece in the People’s Daily.) In this blogpost and a sequel, I’ll see if I can make sense of President Hu’s arithmetic.

这些数据倒很可能是商务部提供的，但我真搞不懂他们是怎么算出来的。（1400万份工作的数据早先就在一份2009版的人民日报中刊登过）。在这篇博客专栏和另一份续集中，我倒想对胡主席的算术水平做点深入了解。

I’ve received great help in this endeavour from Raphael Auer of the Swiss National Bank and Princeton University. In a paper* last year with Andreas Fischer, also of the Swiss National Bank, Mr Auer estimated the impact of low-wage competition on 325 American manufacturing industries—everything from cat food to artificial funeral wreaths.

在这次困难重重的计算中，普林斯顿大学和瑞士国家银行的拉斐尔•奥尔给了我巨大的帮助。在奥尔先生去年与同样来自瑞士国家银行的安德里亚斯•菲舍尔共同完成的论文里，他估算出了低薪竞争对于美国325个制造业的影响——从猫粮到葬礼花圈，无所不包。

Isolating the effect of foreign competition on prices can be tricky. If American demand goes up, for example, it will drive up prices and suck in imports. One might therefore falsely conclude that more imports equals higher prices.
在计算中隔绝外来价格竞争的影响，则极易造成疏漏。比如，假设美国市场需求突然上升，将会导致价格上涨和对进口商品的依赖。有人或许就因此错误地做出“进口越多，价格越高”这种结论。

After dealing with this problem, Messrs Auer and Fischer estimate that whenever Chinese imports increase their market share by 1 percentage point, American producer prices fall by 2.5%, a more pronounced effect than many previous studies had found.

在意识到这一问题之后，奥尔和菲舍尔两位先生计算出了比之前的研究更加确切的结论——中国的进口商品在美国市场的份额每增加1个百分点，美国生产的商品就会降价2.5%

According to Mr Auer, China claimed a 3.7% share of the average market in 2001, rising to 8.6% in 2006, when their data end. Imports from the Middle Kingdom have grown by about 28% in the four years since, even as America’s total imports have grown by only 4%. So let’s assume that China has enlarged its share of America’s manufacturing markets to 10.6%.

中国宣称其平均市场份额从2001年的百分之3.7上升至2006年统计截止时的8.6%。来自中华大地的进口量在过去的四年中增长了28%，尽管美国的总进口量只增长了4%。根据奥尔先生的结论，让我们假设中国已经将他在美国制造业的市场份额扩展到了10.6%。

That would mean that China’s penetration of American markets has increased by 6.9 percentage points from 2001 to 2010 or 0.69 points a year. If each point reduces prices by 2.5%, then this expansion has cut prices by about 1.7% a year.

这就意味着中国对美国市场的渗透从2001到2010年间增加了6.9%，相当于年平均增长0.69个百分点。如果每个百分点将引起价格下降2.5%，那么中国的这些渗透将是美国商品价格每年下降1.7%。

What does that add up to in dollars and cents? American manufacturing sales averaged $4,512 billion a year in the last decade, according to the Annual Survey of Manufactures, including over $13 billion of cat and dog food in 2005. The calculations above suggest these shipments might have cost $4,590 billion if China had failed to encroach on these markets. This implies savings of about $78 billion a year, or $780 billion over the decade.

以上这些数据对于经济有什么作用？根据制造业年检报告，在最近的十年中，美国制造业的平均销售额为每年45120亿，其中包括2005年那些超过130亿美元的猫粮和狗食。以上计算已经表明，如果中国没有成功进入这些市场的话，这些货物或许应该价值45900亿美元。这意味着每年节省了780亿美元，十年就是7800亿。

This is all heroically back-of-the-envelope stuff. But by this reckoning, President Hu’s estimate looks quite plausible, even conservative. In my next post, I’ll look at his claim that exports to China have created more than 14m jobs around the world.

这些就是所有庞大但不需复杂计算的东西。但是以这份账目来说，胡主席的估算看起来差不多对了，甚至有一点保守。在我的下一篇专栏里，我将会把焦点转移到他所说的“对中国的出口创造了超过1400万份工作”这一论断。

* "The effect of low-wage import competition on U.S. inflationary pressure," Journal of Monetary Economics, May 2010
本文资料来自“低薪产业输出竞争力对美国通胀的影响”，货币经济日报，2010年5月刊。