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原文
集中英语Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic
Material Source: World Bank Author: Christian Ketels Introduction
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In the wake of the current economic and financial crisis, countries around the globe are looking for ways to reignite economic growth. Traditionally, export-led growth has been perceived as one of the most promising pathways to do so. The experience of veral waves of Asian economies that achieved high and sustained growth while pursuing a strong export orientationprovided the empirical backdrop for this approach.
Government policy to achieve export-led growth is then esntially about findings ways to increa the ability to ll domestically produced goods and rvices on globalmarkets. This ability to export is what has often been understood as “export competitiveness”. In this thinking, exports become the target and ultimate goal of economic policy.
While the crisis has incread the demand for growth strategies, it has also raid rious concerns ab
out whether the traditional export-led growth strategies are providing the right answer. This note outlines a number of the concerns, ranging from the practical to the conceptual. It argues that an underlying problem has been the misguided interpretation of export competitiveness as the ability to ll globally, a concern that was voiced about the term competitiveness more broadly already more than 15 years ago (Krugman, 1994). As an alternative, the note outlines a growth approach in which exports are a diagnostic instrument and the associated policies focud on exports one plank in a broader competitiveness and growth strategy. It argues that the focus of debate now needs to be on the actual policies that can increa competitiveness rather than exports per.
Policies to improve export competitiveness: Critical issues
The notion that exports and trade more generally are conducive to economic growth has been a long-standing feature of economics. The theoretical arguments
focud traditionally on the ability to exploit gains from trade, esntially leading to higher productivity by exploiting comparative advantages. Over time, arguments related to the exploitation of economies of scale and to different types of externalities became additional features of the debate. The introduction of market imperfection arguments actually introduced significant complicati钢琴的结构
ons: specialization in the“wrong” activities, i.e. tho with lower levels of positive externalities, could hurt growth prospects (Grossman/Helpman, 1991). Exports, then, might not be beneficial per , but only if they occur in the “right” activities.
The empirical analys tried to provide insights into the factual linkages between trade andgrowth. Many rearchers have found a stable relationship between openness and prosperity growth (Baldwin, 2003; Dollar/Kraay, 2002; Frankel/Romer, 1999; Sachs/ Warner 1995), or highlighted the role of trade as a means to tap into foreign knowledge and rai productivity (Coe/Helpman, 1995; Alcala/Ciccone, 2004). But others are more skeptical and attribute the findings to the specific data and econometric approach ud (Rodriguez/Rodrik, 2000; Median-Smith, 2001). There are also questions as to whether the relationship between specific trade policy instruments such as tariffs and growth has not been stable over time (Clemens/Williamson, 2004). On a more basic notion, there remains a significant amount of empirical evidence that trade remains much stronger within countries than across borders (Mayer/Zignago, 2005), even when traditional tariff and non-tariff-barriers have been removed like in the EU’s Internal Market (Ilzkovitz et al., 2007).
While neither the theoretical nor the empirical work provided unequivocal support for targeting exports, the successful example of the Asian economies with their significant export growth inspired
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policy makers to look for ways to enhance growth through policies to increa exports. They are faced with critical issues at three different levels: How can export competitiveness be improved, is export competitiveness (still) a feasible policy approach, and is export competitiveness an appropriate policy objective?
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How can the effectiveness of export competitiveness policies be improved?
If one accepts the notion that exports provide positive externalities and thus should be encouraged by government, the policy question is how to do so most effectively. One large body of thinking is devoted to identifying general barriers to exports that reduce trade below its socially optimal level. Exchange rate (Rodrik, 2009) or other policies to change relative prices can provide a countervailing force
by subsidizing exports. But they increa the costs of imports, hurting both domestic consumption and export-oriented industries with high import content. More effective policies would thus target the barriers directly. Some of the barriers are related to inefficiencies in the domestic business environment, for example tho captured in the World Bank’s Logistical Performance Index (Arvis et al., 2010).Others are related to market access abroad, for example through the tariff and non-tariff b
电脑组装视频arriers captured by the WTO, World Bank, and the OECD. Or they could be related to lagging capabilities of domestic companies, either in understanding foreign markets or in their own products, rvices, or value chains.
Another large body of thinking is devoted to identifying specific ctors in which exports can be incread more easily or with more value being generated. More prosperous countries tend to be more diversified and prent in different product categories that other countries (Hausmann/Hwang/Rodrik; 2005). Most of the new literature focus on the question of how countries can identify ctors that are not only generically more attractive in terms of the prosperity level they can support –the perspective taken by the traditional strategic industrial policy –but also are within reasonable reach for a country given its existing industry portfolio. There has recently been interesting progress on the analytics of identifying relations between industries that make successful diversification em more likely (Hausmann/Klinger, 2006,Delgado/Porter/Stern, 2009; Neffke et al., 2009). There is less systematic progress on identifying the policy tools to develop the related industries in ways in ways that avoid the mistakes of industrial policies in the past. Empirical evidence is also mixed with some recent work suggesting that much of the potential and for export growth and export diversification into more attractive market gments can happen within existing export industries rather than in industries new to a country (Shaw et al., 2009).
Overall there is clear evidence that policies to achieve export competitiveness, understood as the ability to ll on global markets, can be improved.
Are export competitiveness-oriented policies still feasible?
Even if one accepts the notion that export-led growth strategies can work, policy makers face the question as to whether it is a feasible approach for all countries at all times.
One body of literature, emerging already when Asian economies focud on exports to regain growth after the Asian crisis (Felipe, 2003), questions whether the export-orientation is still feasible if it is being pursued by a large number of
countries in parallel. It might have negative terms-of-trade effects if all exports focus on the same industries. It might to lead to unsustainable macroeconomic imbalances with countries running large current account surplus/deficit on a sustained basis if normal adjustments through exchange rate movements work sluggish. This is a possibility that has become very real over the last few years. Export-oriented countries might get trapped in beggar-thy-neighbor policies to capture share in the global market for exports instead of adding to global trade (Atkinson, 2009). There is some evidence of this tension emerging in recent years, for example in Europe as German wage restraint improved i
ts relative cost position on export markets. In importing countries there might be a significant political economy backlash from ctors expod to increasing foreign competition. Here, too, pressure has been rising but so far there is “no significantintensification of trade or investment restrictions” (WTO/OEC D/ UNCTAD, 2010).
Another t of contributions focus more on the question whether export-orientation is feasible in the current economic climate. On the demand side, the sluggish growth in advanced economy markets and the excess capacity globally might leave insufficient room for countries to achieve export growth (Rodrik, 2009;Blecker/Razmi, 2009). However, increasing trade within the south ems to provide alternative export opportunities (Canuto et al., 2010). On the supply side, the almost unlimited labor supply at low wage levels (Lewis, 1954) in China andcountries like Vietnam might make it hard for other countries to compete with them successfully on export markets. The empirical data confirms the prence of this effect but does not indicate that it renders export-driven growth strategies infeasible (Wood/Mayer, 2009). Overall, the discussion remains far from having reached a connsus. At the minimum, there is a n that there is a need to reach a more balanced approach where exports are not t he central driver of countries’ growth strategies.春天里旭日阳刚
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Is the focus on export competitiveness as the ability to export appropriate?
The most fundamental question is whether the focus on raising exports is appropriate as a guiding principle for a sustainable economic growth strategy, whether or not it could be improved or remains feasible.
One concern relates back to the empirical evidence prented at the outt, which indicated that the link between exports and prosperity is less robust and the causal relationship from one to the other is less clear than would be necessary to confidentially put exports at the center of growth strategies. An alternative view of
the data suggests that export-orientation works if some other fundamental conditions are in place. The fundamental conditions should then be at the core of growth policies, not the exports that are their result or, at best, a multiplier of their impact.
Another concern is that the policy focus on exports very easily leads to insufficient attention to domestically-oriented or more traditional ctors (rvices, agriculture). This creates economic costs like traditionally in Japan (Porter at al., 2000). But it is also politically harder to sustain then, for example, the Thai “dual track” strategy with grow th impuls for both exporting and local activities that turned out to generate broad-bad public support (Looney, 2004). An alternative view is to integrate export-orientation in a broader bad growth strategy.
The more general hypothesis is that policies that foster exports by increasing the private profitability of exporting but do not rai productivity of any individual activities can still rai prosperity as long as they drive structural change biad towards higher (in the context of the country) productivity ctors. Policies that rai the productivity of activities in the export ctor can also drive structural change but continue to work even when structural change has slowed down. The attraction of changing relative prices to drive structural change is that this instrument works much faster than the more sustainable, but also slower process of upgrading productivity. This is an area for more conceptual as well as theoretical rearch.
Another candidate has to do more with the competitiveness-oriented framework itlf. While the framework provides conceptual principles and orientation, the specific policy instruments to u have been developed much less in the literature. And there is less practical anddocumented experience from countries that have followed the recommendations. There are a good number of examples where countries have implicitly followed the advice that a competitiveness-oriented analysis would provide. But there are much less examples where countries have moved through an analytical process as sketched out above, design policy priorities accordingly, and then implemented them as planned. Broader-bad adoption of competitiveness-oriented growth policies will to a large degree
depend on providing policy makers with more practical examples and tools that can convince them to take the risk that is inherent in adopting any new policy paradigm.
Literature
Alcalá, Francisco, Antonio Ciccone (2004), Trade and Productivity, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004,613-646.
Arvis, Jean-François, Monica Alina Mustra, Lauri Ojala, Ben Shepherd, Daniel
