Time to put away the league tables
According to a popular saying, "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive." As against this there are
ADVERTISEMENT
the lines of the British gypsy poet, W. H. Davies: "What is this life if
full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?"
In recent years, British and US leaders have wanted to travel hopefully while the countries of "old Europe", such as France and Germany, have sided with the poet, preferring to keep their relatively high living standards and social protection without the strain of going ever faster and farther.
On conventional league tables of gross domestic product growth, the US and Britain have come higher than France and Germany since 1992, whether the computation is of total GDP growth or of real GDP per capita. From this point of view, Spain counts as an honorary Anglo-Saxon country as it has a faster growth rate than the US or the UK, powered by a comparable housing boom and accompanied by an even larger, but easily financed, balance of payments deficit.
It adds a little perspective to reflect that this obsession with GDP growth is among the most frequent grumbles of the educated public against the whole economic policy world. There is a strongly embedded view that, without our continuing striving for more and more, the economic machine would collapse. This position is, in fact, wrong. It is a feature not of genuine political economy but of what I call lumpeneconomics.
There is no reason why entrepreneurial ingenuity should not focus on producing similar total quantities of goods with shorter working hours or more congenial working conditions. In the early 1930s, John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a time when western humanity could turn to the enjoyment of leisure, the arts and civilised intercourse because the progress of science and compound interest growth would have produced enough material goods to satisfy all but a minority.
It pays to look at the origin of the preoccupation with growth league tables. It began with the postwar observation that, while continental countries were concentrating on rebuilding their economies after the second world war, Britain was mainly preoccupied with creating a welfare state and transforming an empire into a Commonwealth. When in opposition, the Labour leader Harold Wilson rarely missed a chance to emphasise these tables. The Kennedy Democrats, when the US national income was by any measure far ahead of the rest of the world, raised the alarm because continental Europe and Japan were experiencing large catch-up rates of change. More recently the tables have been turned and it is the core European countries that are being urged to emulate the "Anglo-Saxon" model.
It is still not clear who will have the last laugh. Private sector analysts are now beginning to forecast a recovery in Old Europe, differing among themselves on how fast it will be. This upturn, if it occurs, will be at least partly cyclical and will not mean that European Union countries have overcome the problems of their social model. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England remain determinedly optimistic on growth prospects for their respective countries. They may get a surprise. Sooner or later the housing booms of the two countries, which now seem to have nine lives, will come to an end and the Anglo-American consumer will no longer be able to come to the rescue. When this happens there will be a more receptive English-speaking audience for downplaying the obsession with GDP league tables.
A recent publication by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has a welcome chapter on the limitations of GDP as a measure of welfare. For instance, the most frequently cited GDP growth figures do not make allowance for leisure. The authors' rough adjustments for this reduce, and in some cases eliminate, much of the gap between the US and other countries. Moreover, there is an extremely loose connection between income and reported life satisfaction. Nevertheless, the mass of governmental and international statistical publications and academic and private sector analysis concentrates not only on crude GDP, but on rates of change rather than absolute levels. On such analysis, rich countries are regarded as performing badly if real GDP merely rises slowly for a few quarters. In spite of all the problems, the authors clearly regard GDP growth as an imperfect but good enough measure.
May I end with a modest proposal? This is to concentrate more on absolute levels rather than rates of change. This will make life more difficult for the statisticians who find it harder to compare, say, the Portuguese and Norwegian national income than to agree on their comparative growth rates. But making life easier for statisticians should not be the main goal of policy. We should occasionally let the vehicle slow down and ask where we are rather than how fast we are travelling.
不要迷信GDP增长排行榜
有
句俗语说：“满怀希望的旅途要比到达目的地更快乐。”与之相对的是英国吉普赛诗人W?H?戴维斯(W. H. Davies)的诗句：“终日营营的生活会是怎样，无暇驻足停留凝神欣赏？”
最近几年，英美领导人一直想满怀希望旅行，而法德等“老欧洲”国家却站在诗人一边，它们更希望既保持相对较高的生活水平和社会保障，又不想有步伐加快加大的压力。
在传统的国内生产总值(GDP)增长排行榜上，无论是按照GDP增长总量还是实际人均GDP计算，美国和英国的排名自1992年起就高于法国和德国。从这个观点来看，西班牙可被算作名誉盎格鲁-撒克逊(Anglo-Saxon)国家，因为它的经济增长率高于美国和英国，其推动力来源于类似的房地产繁荣，并伴随着规模更大、但融资轻松的国际收支逆差。
这进一步反映出，这种对GDP增长的迷恋，是有教养的公众反对整个经济政策界的最常见抱怨之一。有个根深蒂固的观点是，如果我们不持续努力追求更高的增长率，经济机器就会崩溃。这个立场事实上是错误的。这不是真正的政治经济学的特征，而是被我称为流氓经济学(lumpen economics)的特征。
企业家为什么不把聪明才智用于缩短工时或改善工作条件，同时生产出相同数量的产品呢？他们没有理由不这么做。30年代初，约翰?梅纳德?凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)曾期盼这样一个时代：由于科学的进步和复利的增长，已经生产出足够满足绝大部分人的物质产品，因此西方人可以转向享受闲暇、艺术和文明的交往。
看看迷恋经济增长排行榜的起源是有好处的。这要从战后说起，二战后欧洲大陆国家都把注意力集中在重建经济上，而英国却主要致力于建立福利国家，并实现从帝国到联邦的转型。当时在野的英国工党领袖哈罗德?威尔逊(Harold Wilson)，几乎从未错失强调这些排行榜的机会。肯尼迪(Kennedy)政府时期的民主党人就曾拉响警报，因为欧洲大陆和日本都在大跨步迎头赶上，而当时美国的国民收入以任何指标衡量都远高于其它各国。最近形势发生了变化，被迫仿效“盎格鲁-撒克逊”模式的是核心欧洲国家。
究竟谁会笑到最后仍不清楚。私人部门分析师目前正开始预测老欧洲的复苏，但在复苏的速度上则意见不一致。如果出现经济复苏，至少在一定程度上是因为景气循环，并不意味着欧盟(EU)国家克服了它们社会模式的问题。同时，美联储(Fed)和英国央行(Bank of England)，对各自国家的经济增长前景仍持坚定的乐观态度。它们可能会感到意外，这两个国家的房地产繁荣现在看来似乎生命力很强，但迟早都会终结，届时，英美消费者也将回天乏术。一旦发生这种情况，英语国家的人们将更容易接受对迷恋GDP排行榜的贬低。
在经合组织(OECD)最近的出版物中，很受欢迎的一章谈到了用GDP衡量福利的局限性。例如，最常被引用的GDP增长数据，并没有考虑到休闲。作者对此进行的粗略调整，大幅缩小了(某些情况下消除了)美国和其它国家的差距。此外，收入和报告的生活满意度之间的联系极为松散。不过，大多数政府和国际统计刊物，以及学术和私人部门分析不仅关注原始GDP数据，也关注GDP变化速度，而非绝对水平。按这种分析，假如富国的实际GDP只是有几个季度上涨缓慢，就会被认为表现糟糕。尽管存在这些问题，但很明显，作者还是把GDP增长当作虽有缺点但已足够好的指标。
请让我在本文结束时提个小小的建议吧。建议就是更多关注绝对水平而非变化速度。这会让统计师的日子很难过，比如，他们会发现，相比就葡萄牙和挪威的可比增长率达成一致，比较它们的国民收入更加困难了。但让统计师的日子好过不应成为政策的主要目标。我们应该时不时放慢行车速度，问一下我们到哪里了，而不是问我们的车开得有多快。
