主题：有人看过最近ECONOMIST的一篇关于新经济秩序的文章 -- 远航

Financial wobbles this summer acted as a reminder that

emerging economies are more volatile than rich-country ones;

yet their long-run prospects look excellent, so long as they

continue to move towards free and open markets, sound fiscal

and monetary policies and better education. Because they start

with much less capital per worker than developed economies, they have huge scope for boosting

productivity by importing Western machinery and know-how. Catching up is easier than being a leader.

When America and Britain were industrialising in the 19th century, they took 50 years to double their real

incomes per head; today China is achieving the same feat in nine years.

What's new

Emerging economies as a group have been growing faster than developed economies for several

decades. So why are they now making so much more of a difference to the old rich world? The first

reason is that the gap in growth rates between the old and the new world has widened (see chart 3). But

more important, emerging economies have become more integrated into the global system of production,

with trade and capital flows accelerating relative to GDP in the past ten years.

China joined the World Trade Organisation only in 2001. It is

having a bigger global impact than other emerging economies

because of its vast size and its unusual openness to trade and

investment with the rest of the world. The sum of China's totalexports and imports amounts to around 70% of its GDP,

against only 25-30% in India or America. By next year, China is

likely to account for 10% of world trade, up from 4% in 2000.

What is also new is that the internet has made it possible

radically to reorganise production across borders. Thanks to

information technology, many once non-tradable services, such

as accounting, can be provided from afar, exposing more

sectors in the developed world to competition from India and

elsewhere.

Faster growth that lifts the living standards of hundreds of

millions of people in poor countries should be a cause for

celebration. Instead, many bosses, workers and politicians in

the rich world are quaking in their boots as output and jobs

shift to low-wage economies in Asia or eastern Europe. Yet on

balance, rich countries should gain from poorer ones getting

richer. The success of the emerging economies will boost both

global demand and supply.

Rising exports give developing countries more money to spend on imports from richer ones. And

although their average incomes are still low, their middle classes are expanding fast, creating a vast new

market. Over the next decade, almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace as

household incomes rise above the threshold at which people generally begin to spend on non-essential

goods. Emerging economies have already become important markets for rich-world firms: over half of

the combined exports of America, the euro area and Japan go to these poorer economies. The rich

economies' trade with developing countries is growing twice as fast as their trade with one another.

The future boost to demand will be large. But more important in the long term will be the stimulus to the

world economy from what economists call a “positive supply shock”. As China, India and the former

Soviet Union have embraced market capitalism, the global labour force has, in effect, doubled. The

world's potential output is also being lifted by rapid productivity gains in developing countries as they try

to catch up with the West.

This increased vitality in emerging economies is raising global growth, not substituting for output

elsewhere. The newcomers boost real incomes in the rich world by supplying cheaper goods, such as

microwave ovens and computers, by allowing multinational firms to reap bigger economies of scale, and

by spurring productivity growth through increased competition. They will thus help to lift growth in world

GDP just when the rich world's greying populations would otherwise cause it to slow. Developed countries

will do better from being part of this fast-growing world than from trying to cling on to a bigger share of

a slow-growing one.

Stronger growth in emerging economies will make developed countries as a whole better off, but not

everybody will be a winner. The integration of China and other developing countries into the world

trading system is causing the biggest shift in relative prices and incomes (of labour, capital, commodities,

goods and assets) for at least a century, and this, in turn, is leading to a big redistribution of income. For

example, whereas prices of the labour-intensive goods that China and others export are falling, prices of

the goods they import, notably oil, are rising.