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Boom and bust in Asia
亚洲的兴衰
Going for growth
谋求经济发展
Explaining Asia’s economic success is as easy as one, two, three
亚洲经济成功的秘诀用三点就足以概括
Jul 13th 2013 |From the print edition
How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. By Joe Studwell. Grove;
《亚洲是如何运作的——论全球最具活力地区的成与败》，Joe Studwell 著。
IN 1989 John Williamson, a British economist in Washington, DC, listed ten economic policies that enjoyed the backing of the IMF, the World Bank and many of their clients in Latin America. Whatever the merits of these policies, the “Washington consensus”, as he called it, proved badly named. Its prescriptions—stabilise, privatise and liberalise—have caused no end of controversy. Almost 25 years later, they get another drubbing in Joe Studwell’s provocative new book, “How Asia Works”.
1989年，英国经济学家 John Williamson 在华盛顿提出了十条经济政策，受到了国际货币基金组织、世界银行以及拉丁美洲多国的支持——这也就是他所谓的“华盛顿共识”。事实证明，无论这些政策有何种优点，都远远算不上什么“共识”。“共识”指出要采取稳定化、私有化和自由化的措施，由此引发了无数争议。大约二十五年后的今天，Joe Studwell 推出了一本措辞激进的新书《亚洲是如何运作的》。在这本书里，Williamson 的这些经济政策又一次被批驳得体无完肤。
But Mr Studwell’s own manifesto for economic success does resemble the Washington consensus in one respect: it holds that poor economies can prosper by following a short recipe of tried and tested policies. This is now an unfashionable approach among economists, who have turned their attention from policies to “institutions”: the social and political constraints that weigh on ministers, whatever policies they avow. Most authors shy away from prescriptions for success, arguing that every development dish is different.
然而，就某方面而言，Studwell 本人对经济成功的阐述确实和“华盛顿共识”有几分相似之处：他认为贫穷经济体可以把某些经过尝试和考验的政策当作短期方针，以实现自身的繁荣。可经济学者们如今并不看好这种途径，已经把目光从政策转向了“体制”方面：因为无论政界高官支持何种政策，社会和政治方面的约束总是会让他们裹足不前。很多作家都认为每个国家或地区的发展模式都是与众不同的，不愿意写书来阐述什么经济成功之道。
Mr Studwell has no such inhibitions. Asia’s post-war miracle economies emerged, he argues, by following a recipe with just three ingredients: land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repression.
Studwell 却没有这种顾虑。他认为，有些亚洲经济体在战后奇迹般地崛起了，而它们成功的秘诀归根结底无非就是三点：一是土地改革；二是由出口带动、由国家支持的制造业；三是金融抑制政策。
The process began with the ousting of the landlords. Feudal estates were broken up and divided among small farmers, who also received cheap credit and valuable advice. Smallholder farming requires “grotesque” amounts of labour, Mr Studwell concedes. But that is a good thing, because countries as poor as Taiwan or South Korea were in the 1950s have labour—and only labour—in abundance.
这些经济体的崛起是以地主退出历史舞台为起点的。封建式的私有地产被没收并分配给了小农户，同时他们还获得了低息贷款和宝贵的经验。Studwell 承认，小农型耕作需要“令人无法想象的”大量劳动力。但这不失为一件好事：因为在二十世纪五十年代，像台湾或是韩国这样贫穷的地区拥有大批劳动力——除此之外也没有别的了。
Tightly planted, closely tended farms coax the best yields out of each parcel of land. This rural bounty then creates room for the next step: export-led manufacturing. The state, Mr Studwell argues, must nurse manufacturers through their infancy, helping them to learn how to stand on their own feet. This nurture should, however, be combined with discipline: the state must oblige firms to export. Foreign sales provide an external test of their progress, allowing the state to “cull losers”, even if it cannot pick winners.
在这些地区，农场上种满了密密麻麻的作物，又受到了仔细的照料，每一块地都有很不错的产量。而后，这种农业上的富庶为亚洲繁荣的下一步（也就是由出口带动的制造业）创造了空间。Studwell 认为，国家必须在制造业者尚且处于“婴幼儿期”时为它们提供充分的呵护，让它们学会如何去依靠自身力量实现发展。然而，在呵护的同时还需要进行约束：国家必须强制要求这些公司进行出口。对外销量为制造业者的发展提供了一种外在的衡量尺度，让国家得以“淘汰弱者”——即便是在无法挑选出强者的情况下。
The final secret of Asian success, Mr Studwell argues, was a cowed financial system. Captive savers, penned in by capital controls, were ripped off by the banks, which paid low interest rates. This allowed the banks to subsidise industrial firms through their years of education.
Studwell 认为，亚洲成功的最后一条秘诀就是那种受到国家钳制的金融体系。银行提供的存款利率很低，但储户被资本管制所束缚，除了接受银行的讹诈之外别无选择。这笔资金让银行得以为产业公司提供了数年的“教育经费”。
Mr Studwell’s recipe is not original: the formula dates back at least 140 years, he shows, to Japan under the Meiji emperor. Only the first step, smallholder farming, would be backed by this newspaper. But “How Asia Works” is a striking and enlightening book, which reflects the author’s unusual career. Having worked as an analyst (for the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company) and a consultant, he wrote books on China’s seduction of foreign businessmen and Asia’s crony capitalists. Then he went back to school, embarking on a doctorate at Cambridge, home to a number of unorthodox economists.
Studwell 的秘方并非独开先河。他表示这些成功秘诀至少可以追溯到一百四十年前明治天皇统治下的日本。而本报只对其中的第一步（也就是小农耕作）持支持态度。不过，《亚洲是如何运作的》这本书确实富于启迪性，让人耳目一新。它折射了作者不寻常的职业生涯。Studwell 曾经在本报的姊妹公司经济学人信息部担任过分析人士，也曾经从事过咨询工作。他写过几本书，论述过中国对外商的吸引力、以及亚洲的裙带资本家等等。而后他回到校园攻读博士学位，进的正是剑桥大学——这里有很多不拘传统的经济学家。
The result is a lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic. Its heart is a historical account of how smallholder farming, export-led manufacturing and financial repression took root in Asia’s miracle economies, such as Japan and Taiwan, but failed to bed down in the Philippines and Indonesia. This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis.
最终，Studwell 把学术研究、调查报道以及书面论战生动地糅为一体。在一些创造奇迹的亚洲经济体中（比如日本和台湾），小农耕作、由出口带动的制造业以及金融抑制政策是如何植根的？在菲律宾和印度尼西亚，同样的措施又为何没有形成气候？本书重点从历史角度论述了这些问题。书中还穿插了一些游记见闻，描述了亚洲大地上经济繁荣或是衰颓的景象：Studwell 写到了日本新泻县稻农的简陋住所——这些农民有高超的农业技术，却不懂什么建筑美学；也写到了雅加达岸巷里尚未建成的塔楼——由于亚洲金融危机，这些塔楼迟迟未能完工。
The most impressive part of the book is the 68 pages of footnotes in which Mr Studwell dips into his trove of reading and reporting. He includes observations on Javanese chickens, the sex life of a Korean chaebol-founder, the constitutional rules that Meiji-era Japan copied from Prussia and his exchanges with Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former strongman.
本书让人印象最为深刻的部分就是长达68页的脚注。Studwell 读过很多书，也进行过大量报道，在脚注里他粗略提及了一些。他谈到了爪哇人饲养的鸡，谈到了韩国某个财团创始人的性生活，谈到了明治时代日本模仿普鲁士设立的宪章，还谈到了他和马来西亚前铁腕领导人马哈蒂尔•穆罕默德之间的对话。
In these notes, Mr Studwell wanders into the weeds of development (quite literally: Japanese rice is weeded nine times a year, he writes). But he never gets lost. The three-step doctrine he advocates is even shorter than the ten-step Washington consensus he opposes. But it will no doubt prove similarly controversial.
在这些脚注中，Studwell 偶尔会提到一些阻碍经济发展的“杂草”（从字面意义上来说，他写到日本的水稻一年需要进行九次除草）。但Studwell 从未偏离主题。相比他所反对的“十步走”式华盛顿共识，他本人提倡的“三步走”主义甚至更为简略。但毫无疑问，二者都将会充满争议。
