Offshore Outsourcing Finds Fans at Fed Forum
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. -- Globalization, the conventional wisdom goes, has downsides: It hurts the wages of the lesser skilled. It leads to large and possibly dangerous trade imbalances. It can threaten economic stability through financial-market volatility.
But academics, investment bankers and government officials at the Federal Reserve's annual symposium here heard a much more upbeat vision of a globally integrated world. For example, it is usually said that outsourcing work from a high-wage country, such as the U.S., to lower-wage ones -- also dubbed "offshoring" -- makes workers in the richer country's affected industries worse off, but the country as a whole better off, because consumers enjoy lower prices on the products made overseas. But Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University argued that offshoring can lead to higher wages for unskilled U.S. workers.
"Things may be better than they would have been had there been no offshoring," Mr. Grossman said. When a company offshores some work, its remaining workers become more productive. It can thus expand, hire more workers -- perhaps even some of those whose work was offshored -- to do jobs that can't be offshored, and it can pay at least some of them more.
The proof is that wages of unskilled, blue-collar workers didn't do worse than they actually did between 1997 and 2004, given two strong, offsetting economic forces: the surge in productivity, or output per hour of work, which should have lifted their wages, and the decline in prices of imports, which should have pushed down their wages by lowering the prices of the competing goods these workers made.
Anthony Venables of the London School of Economics argued that when an industry in a rich country starts trading with a poor country, the wages in the rich country may actually pull further away from those in the poor country, instead of converging down to the lower level as standard economic theory predicts. The reason? The industry in the rich country may rely on many local inputs that its competitors in a new foreign market don't have -- access to specialized workers, for example, or daily face-to-face contact with competitors and customers.
This proximity can give the domestic industry a big advantage in the new foreign market, making it more productive and able to pay higher wages.
A third Jackson Hole presentation said the puzzle over why the U.S. borrows so much from China and other developing countries may have a relatively benign explanation -- perhaps alleviating concern over the enormous U.S. trade deficit.
In the textbooks, rich countries are supposed to lend to poor countries, because investment opportunities are better there. But the U.S. borrows hundreds of billions of dollars a year, especially from China, to finance the massive U.S. trade deficit.
Economists worry that these foreigners could suddenly lose their appetite for lending to the U.S., producing a sharp drop in the dollar and a rise in U.S. interest rates. But Eswar Prasad, Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the International Monetary Fund found that over time, developing countries that borrow from the rich actually grow more slowly, while developing countries that lend to rich countries grow more quickly.
They conclude that incomes in developing countries such as China have grown faster than the Chinese ability to spend and invest, perhaps because their financial systems are underdeveloped. The excess, which takes the form of savings, gets sent abroad, into U.S. Treasury bonds or mortgages.
While this helps explain today's unusual imbalances, the authors warned that this doesn't mean they can be sustained for long.
Another imbalance that has preoccupied economists and central bankers around the world is the sharp rise in many countries in housing prices, which in turn reflects unusually low long-term interest rates world-wide, even in the U.S., where the Fed has steadily raised short-term rates during the past two years. The threat of a sharp reversal is one of the Fed's central preoccupations today, and one that dominated much of the informal chatter between sessions at the conference. For now, the Fed sees an orderly cooling but is on the lookout for a more convulsive decline.
Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard University observed that prices of assets such as houses, bonds and stocks have remained volatile as the business cycle has become more stable around the world. Mr. Rogoff argued that the success of world central banks in bringing down inflation and stabilizing growth has made the world less risky. Counterintuitive though it sounds, this makes markets seem more risky. Here's why: Investors demand less compensation for the risk of holding an asset, so they bid up its price and accept a lower return. But at their new, higher level, asset prices are much more sensitive to perceived changes in risk. Thus, Mr. Rogoff said, higher and more volatile asset prices might be the price of successful monetary policy, an observation former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan made at last year's conference.
The lesson for the Fed and other central bankers, he says, isn't to target the prices of assets but to be careful of how their policies and communications can unsettle financial markets.
Jackson Hole may have left participants more optimistic about the benefits of globalization, but not necessarily for its current prospects. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke opened the conference by saying that "further progress in global integration" is threatened by protectionist pressure from those who stand to lose the most.
全球化也许没那么大副作用
人们一向认为，全球化有明显的副作用。它会降低发达国家非熟练工人的收入水平、导致巨大的、可能有很大危害性的贸易失衡。它还会造成金融市场动荡、进而危害经济稳定。
但正在怀俄明州杰克森霍尔召开年度讨论会的学者、投资界人士及美国联邦储备委员会(Federal Reserve，简称Fed)的官员们听到的有关全球一体化前景的展望中，乐观的东西更多些。比如，有一种很流行的说法是，高工资的富裕国家将某些工作岗位外包到海外低成本国家对这些富裕国家本身有利，因为国内消费者将因此享受到更价廉物美的消费品，不过，它将导致前者受影响行业的从业人员生活水平下降。然而，普林斯顿大学的吉恩?格罗斯曼(Gene Grossman)和伊斯特班?罗西-汉斯伯格(Esteban Rossi-Hansberg)却得出结论认为，外包能提高美国非技术熟练工人的工资水平。
格罗斯曼说，对这些非技术熟练工人来说，情况或许反而比没有外包时更好。当一家公司将部分工作外包出去之后，留下的工人生产率更高了。公司因此得以扩大、然后雇佣更多员工（这其中可能还包括一些工作岗位被外包出去的工人）从事那些不能外包的岗位，并因此有可能提高给这些工人的报酬。
有一个事实能证明上述结论，那就是：蓝领非技术熟练工人的工资水平并不比他们1997-2004年之间的实际水平低，在这背后存在着两大作用方向相反的因素：一是生产率大幅提高，这是有助于提高工资的因素；一是进口价格下降，这导致这些工人生产的同类产品价格也相应下降，从而起到了拉低其工资水平的作用。
伦敦经济学院(London School of Economics)的安东尼?威纳伯(Anthony Venables)认为，当富国与穷国开展贸易的时候，富国与穷国的工资水平差距实际上反而会拉大，而不是像经典理论认为的富国的工资水平会向穷国靠拢。
原因何在呢？富国的某一行业在国内或许拥有许多其国外竞争对手们所没有的资源，比如专业人员或者与竞争对手或客户面对面接触的机会等等。这种近水楼台产生的便利使该行业在国内市场上拥有很大优势，这让它生产率更高、能支付更高的工资。
人们在杰克森霍尔听到的第三场说明会显示，关于美国对中国和其他发展中国家有大量外债的原因，或许存在一个还算让人愉快的解释，这也许能让担心美国巨额贸易赤字的人稍感欣慰。
根据以往教科书上的理论，一般是富国借钱给穷国，因为穷国的投资机会更多。但事实却是美国每年从其他国家借入数千亿美元的钱用以填补其贸易赤字，其中有很大一块来自中国。
经济学家们担心，一旦这些国家突然不愿再借钱给美国，那么美元汇率会急跌、美国的利率也将迅速攀升。但来自国际货币基金组织(International Monetary Fund)的伊斯沃?普拉赛德(Eswar Prasad)、拉格拉姆?拉贾(Raghuram Rajan)和阿文德?萨伯拉马尼(Arvind Subramanian)发现，经过一段时间之后，向富国借钱的发展中国家增长比较慢，而借钱给富国的发展中国家增长速度却更快。
他们对此的解释是，中国等发展中国家收入的增长速度超过了他们的支出和投资能力，这或许是因为它们的金融系统尚不发达。多出的这些以储蓄形式存在的资金被投向美国国债或抵押贷款市场。
虽然上述说法在一定程度上解释了今天美国存在巨额赤字的原因，但三位人士警告说，这种情况未必能持续很长时间。
另一个引起经济学家和Fed人士关注的全球性问题是许多国家出现的住房价格急剧上升的现象，这反应了全球性的长期利率异常偏低的问题，美国也是这样，虽然Fed过去两年来已连续数次上调短期利率。
目前Fed最担心的是住房价格出现急剧逆转，这也是这次会议间隙人们在非正式讨论中谈到最多的话题。Fed认为眼下市场尚处于有序降温的状态，但它对出现急速下跌的局面保持着高度警觉。
哈佛大学的肯尼斯?罗格夫(Kenneth Rogoff)认为，在全世界的商业周期变得越来越稳定的同时，住房、债券和股票等资产的价格却一直保持较大程度的波动。他认为，各国央行在抑制通货膨胀、维持经济稳定增长方面取得的成功使世界经济的风险性大大降低，这反而让市场更动荡了，这个结果跟人们的直觉恰恰相反。
为什么会这样呢？这是因为，在稳定的商业环境下，投资者对持有上述资产所得回报的要求降低了，因此，他们竞相出高价购买这些资产，并能接受比较低的投资回报。但到了新的比较高的价位后，资产价格对潜在的风险变化就要敏感多了。因此罗格夫说，Fed前主席格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)在去年的讨论会上曾指出，较高且容易波动的资产价格或许是成功的货币政策要付出的代价。
罗格夫说，这对Fed及其他央行人士的启示是，不要过于关注资产价格，应该当心别让他们的政策和对外表态引起金融市场的不安。他打趣道：如果Fed对资产价格的波动性像市场对Fed的不确定性一样太过关注，那就不对了。
杰克森霍尔或许会让与会人士对全球化的好处充满信心，但未必能让大家对短期前景同样乐观。Fed主席贝南克(Ben Bernanke)在会议开幕时说，来自保护主义的压力阻碍着全球化取得更大进展，这些人在这一过程中将遭受极大的损失。
