一年多以来，全球经济新闻的头条都在报道中国经济增长速度放缓。但通过近距离地观察中国区域经济发展动向，我们可以看到一些与这些声音不同的东西——与其说中国经济处在减速期，不如说中国经济处于换挡期。

中国国家统计局的数据显示，尽管资源丰富的山西省经济下行压力很大，但诸如重庆、贵州等西南省份的经济都还在蓬勃增长。虽然东北三省和河北省正在遭遇经济衰退的阵痛，但同样以重工业见长的天津、山东和江苏，经济却并没有受到太大影响，仍然在蓬勃发展。

2016年上半年各地GDP增速

2008年金融危机之后，低速增长已成为多个国家的“新常态”，中国加快了经济再平衡的步伐，经济增长的支柱产业由出口制造转为国内消费的商品和服务。

这一转变对未来中国经济的增长动力产生了深远的影响。在过去的出口战略中，政府的首要目标是使国内的生产制造与全球产业链对接。如今，政府更重要的目标在于满足国内消费者不断多样化的需求。事实上，与国内消费者的需求紧密相关的产业正在中国蓬勃发展。

如今正在蓬勃发展的这些经济活动，以前是一直被划归服务业，而不是制造业。但服务业不是从空气里蹦出来的。所有商业活动都需要工业制成品、交通、信息和通信技术、物流、地产、金融、保险等行业与之配套。因此，对新服务提出的新需求，能够对基础设施和设备的资本投资形成良性促进作用。与传统认知不同，服务业的增长是为了满足国内消费需求，并不意味着制造业和资本投资的末日，更不意味着经济增长已走到尽头。

事实上，服务业的增长几乎弥补了出口导向型制造业产量下降给中国经济造成的减速效应。中国的交通运输、信息与通信技术、金融、保险、地产、教育以及医疗等行业长期以来普遍存在着劳动生产率过低的现象，这正意味着这些行业有很大的提升空间。

经济学家Jong-Wha Lee和Warwick J. McKibbin在一篇论文中提出，亚洲各国服务业生产率的提高“最终将惠及所有经济部门，并会为亚洲各国的经济带来可持续的、平衡的增长。”通过研究韩国经济发展趋势，他们发现，在交通运输、地产、以及信息与通信技术等服务业部门，每个工人所创造的平均附加值要高于制造业。同样的现象也出现在美国、日本、中国等国家。

这项发现意味着，中国服务经济的快速发展可以扭转2008年以来外部需求下降所致的经济增长乏力状况。然而，日本、韩国由出口型增长转向内需驱动型增长的经验告诉我们，经济结构转型是一个漫长而痛苦的过程。

中国当下就处于这一过程当中，而且中国还必须注意，不应弱化现有的经济增长点，以免经济掉入结构性陷阱，导致转型成本抵消转型收益。在中国多个省份，此类高昂的成本已经拖累了整体经济增长，这可不是个好兆头。

尽管中国消费者有巨大的经济潜力，但中国仍面临根本性挑战。首先，以多样化内需带动经济发展，比出口导向型经济增长更加复杂，因为新的产业部门更依赖高端金融服务业、自由公平的市场准入条件、高素质的劳动者，以及在研发领域的大笔投资。

因此，在经济增长模式转型过程中应运而生的新产业，对经济治理提出了相当高的要求，而这是中国目前的经济治理体系所无法满足的。深化结构性改革注定无法讨好所有人，但它能够有效解决这个问题，因此中国领导人需要拿出魄力，做出艰难的政治决断。

此外，即便经过25年出口导向型增长，中国城镇化率仍然偏低，且城镇化速度缓慢。这是中国面临的另一大根本性挑战。信息通讯技术、金融、保险、交通、房地产等产业，都是服务型经济的主要构成要素，它们互相依赖、缺一不可，而城市正是汇聚这些要素的地方——这种现象在经济学里叫做连带外部效应。不妙的是，中国长期存在的城乡二元结构以及糟糕的城市规划，已经造成了都市社区的碎片化和分散化，缺少多样化的的协作网络，不利于生产力的提高。

从长期来看，中国经济要取得成功，城市是个关键因素。中国应该立即加快城镇化步伐，并在10到15年内，面向服务主导型经济增长，进一步扩大都市网络覆盖面。如果能成功应对上述挑战，中国将扫清障碍，走上通往高收入国家的坦途。

（原文刊载于8月19日的Project Syndicate，原标题《China’s Painful Structural Transformation》作者授权观察者网翻译。观察者网| 吴娅坤 马力 译 杨晗译 校）

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China’s Painful Structural Transformation

SHANGHAI – For more than a year, headlines worldwide have been pointing to a Chinese economic slowdown. But a closer look at regional dynamics within China tells a different story – one that is less about deceleration than changing gears.

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the resource-rich province of Shanxi has suffered an economic slowdown, but the southwestern provinces of Chongqing and Guizhou have experienced vibrant growth. Hebei and three other northeastern provinces are feeling the effects of recession, but the heavy-industry economies of Tianjin, Shandong, and Jiangsu are booming.

After the 2008 financial crisis, when slower growth became the “new normal” for many countries, China began to accelerate its economic rebalancing by shifting the drivers of growth from manufacturing and exports toward goods and services for domestic consumption.

This transition has had far-reaching implications for the future dynamics of China’s economy. With its previous export strategy, the government’s main priority was to integrate domestic manufacturing operations into global production chains. Now, however, its aim is an economy that meets domestic consumers’ diverse demands, and it is the industries closely connected to those demands that are quickly expanding.

Previously, the economic activities that are now flourishing weren’t categorized as manufacturing industries at all, but as “services.” But services do not exist in a vacuum. All businesses need manufactured products, transportation, information and communications technology (ICT), logistics, real estate, finance, insurance, and more. Thus, new demand for new services has virtuous-cycle effects in terms of capital investment in infrastructure and equipment. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the growth of services in China to meet domestic demand does not mean the end of manufacturing and capital investment, much less of economic growth.

Service sectors stand to make up for much, if not all, of the growth lost to lower output in export-oriented manufacturing branches. China’s transportation, ICT, finance, insurance, real estate, education, and health-care sectors have long had inappropriately low labor productivity, which means they have significant room to grow faster.

According to a paper by the economists Jong-Wha Lee and Warwick J. McKibbin, service-sector productivity growth in Asia “benefits all sectors eventually, and contributes to the sustained and balanced growth of Asian economies.” Examining economic development trends in South Korea, the authors find that the average value added per worker in transportation, real estate, and ICT is now higher than the average in manufacturing, and they point to similar dynamics in the United States, Japan, and China.

This finding suggests that rapid development in China’s service economy could reverse the externally triggered dampening of growth since 2008. But, as the Japanese and South Korean transitions from export to domestic demand-driven growth demonstrate, structural transformation is a slow and painful process.

China is in the midst of that process, and it must be careful not to undermine existing sources of growth lest it fall into a structural trap where the cost of transition itself derails new gains. It is not a good sign that the high costs in many Chinese provinces have been weighing down overall growth.

This points to fundamental challenges ahead, notwithstanding the significant economic potential of Chinese consumers. For starters, economic development based on diversified domestic demand is more complicated than export-driven development, because these new sectors rely more heavily on sophisticated financial services, free and equitable market access, better educated workers, and higher investment in research and development.

As a result, the new businesses emerging from the shift to a new growth model are demanding far more from China’s current economic-governance system than it can bear. Further structural reforms would go a long way toward fixing this problem, but they will also require China’s leaders to make tough political decisions that won’t please everyone.

Another fundamental challenge is China’s slow rate of urbanization, which is still lagging, even after 25 years of export-led growth. Each of a thriving service economy’s major components – ICT, finance, insurance, transportation, and real estate – needs the others to prosper, and cities are what bring them all together – a phenomenon of network externalities. Unfortunately, China’s enduring system of dividing urban and rural regions, together with poor urban planning, has led to fragmented and scattered metropolitan communities without diversified networks that would otherwise have helped boost productivity.

China’s cities will be a key ingredient of its long-term economic success. Urbanization should start accelerating today, and over the next 10-15 years, with the expansion of metropolitan areas geared toward the needs of services-led economic growth. If China can rise to that challenge, it will be well positioned to clear the remaining hurdles in its path toward high-income status.

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