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China needs a service revolution
By Barry Eichengreen
Saturday, Jun 26, 2010, Page 8
China is getting its exchange-rate adjustment, whether it
likes it or not. While Chinese officials continue to mull the right time to let
the yuan rise, manufacturing workers are voting with their feet ¡X and their
picket lines.
Honda has offered its transmission-factory workers in China a 24 percent wage
increase to head off a crippling strike. Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract
manufacturer for Apple and Dell, has announced wage increases of as much as 70
percent. Shenzhen, to head off trouble, has announced a 16 percent increase in
the minimum wage. Beijing¡¦s municipal authorities have pre-emptively boosted the
city¡¦s minimum wage by 20 percent.
The result will be to raise the prices of China¡¦s exports and fuel demand for
imports. The effect will be much the same as a currency appreciation.
China should count these wage increases as a measure of its success. Higher
incomes are an entirely normal corollary of economic growth.
The only difference in China is that the adjustment has been suppressed, so it
is now coming abruptly. It would have been better if Chinese officials had
encouraged earlier and more gradual adjustment and if adjustment had come
through currency appreciation, which would have enhanced workers¡¦ command over
imports, rather than inflation, which will make no one happy. All that, however,
is water under the bridge.
With exports of manufactured goods becoming more expensive, China will have to
grow by producing something else. It will have to move away from a strategy in
which manufacturing is the engine of growth toward the model of a more mature
economy, in which employment is increasingly concentrated in the service sector.
China will never rival India as an exporter of high-tech and business services
because it lacks that country¡¦s large population of native English speakers.
However, it has ample scope for expanding the supply of personal and business
services for a desperately underserved, increasingly prosperous domestic market.
This is a point that Morgan Stanley¡¦s chief economist Stephen Roach makes in his
new book, The Next Asia.
The good news, as Roach observes, is that the service sector places less burden
on natural resources and creates more employment than manufacturing. The former
is good news for China¡¦s carbon footprint, the latter for its social stability.
However, the bad news is that the transition now being asked of China ¡X to shift
toward services without experiencing a significant decline in economy-wide
productivity growth ¡X is unprecedented in Asia. Every high-growth,
manufacturing-intensive Asian economy that has attempted it has suffered a
massive slowdown.
The problem is more than just the tendency of productivity to grow more slowly
in services than manufacturing. Service-sector productivity growth in formerly
manufacturing-heavy Asian economies has been dismal by international standards.
In both South Korea and Japan, to cite two key examples, the problem is not
simply that productivity in services has grown barely a quarter as fast as it
has in manufacturing over the past decade. It is that service-sector
productivity growth has run at barely half the rate of the US.
Why is this? In countries that have traditionally emphasized manufacturing, the
underdeveloped service sector is dominated by small enterprises ¡X mom and pop
stores. These lack the scale to be efficient, the ability to exploit modern
information technology and the capacity to undertake research and development
(R&D). In South Korea, less than 10 percent of economy-wide R&D has been
directed at the service sector in the last decade. This stands in sharp contrast
to the US, where half of all R&D is associated with services. Enough said.
In both South Korea and Japan, large firms¡¦ entry into the service sector is
impeded by restrictive regulation, for which small producers are an influential
lobby group. Regulation prevents wholesalers from branching downstream into
retailing and vice versa. Foreign firms that are carriers of innovative
organizational knowledge and technology are barred from coming in. Accountants,
architects, attorneys and engineers all then jump on the bandwagon, using
restrictive licensing requirements to limit supply, competition and foreign
entry.
One can well imagine Chinese shopkeepers, butchers and healthcare workers
following this example.
The results would be devastating. Where value added in Chinese manufacturing has
been growing by 8 percent a year, service sector productivity is unlikely to
exceed 1 percent if China is unlucky or unwise enough to follow the example of
South Korea and Japan.
Employing workers in sectors where their productivity is stagnant would not be a
recipe for social stability.
China needs to avoid the pattern by which past neglect of the service sector
creates a class of incumbents who use political means to maintain their
position.
Perhaps China will succeed in avoiding this fate. Here at least may be one
not-so-grim advantage to being undemocratic.
Barry Eichengreen is professor of economics and political
science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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