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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Is the American Model Right for the World?
Columbia Business School Alumni Reunion
April 17, 2004
Glenn Hubbard, Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Asset Management
The topic that the three of us have—whether there’s an American model that’s right for
the world—is probably at once the biggest policy question in the United States this year,
and it’s an election year, and I’m going to argue that it’s also one of the biggest questions
and challenges that we face in business schools.
The way I come to this is to do a twist on my father-in-law’s question to me, the familiar
father-in-law question: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And turn that around
and ask the question: if we’re so rich in the United States, why is it that we’re not
teaching everybody else to be so smart and rich at the same time?
To look at this, I want to think of three basic questions. First, is there a basic American
model? Second, if there were one, is it “right for the world”? And third, and perhaps most
important, why does the, quote, American model seem to be under attack—mainly in
America?
To start with the first of these, whether there’s an American model, your intuition might
be to unambiguously say yes. One reason is, we have seen a sea change in our country’s
growth prospects in recent years. And it’s just extraordinary. If you look at the shift in
prospects for long-term economic growth and productivity growth in our country, since
the mid-1990s we have seen something that is outside the experience and thought of most
economists and people who study technical change. It’s really a miracle.
When we ask people why that’s the case, the common answer is, well, it’s about
technology. Because we all remember the old days when technology was crappy. When I
was in graduate school we had these big punch-card boxes. And productivity growth was
bad. And today, technology is good and productivity growth is good, therefore they’re
related. That just isn’t the case.
If you think about what happened, the growth miracle is not a world miracle, it’s an
American miracle. And we all have essentially the same technology. Most of you travel
and you know that technology is actually better in many respects outside the United
States. What I think many economists would argue is the case for this America model is
the set of institutions in the United States. An institution is kind of a vague term, but what
economists mean are ways we allocate capital, particularly risk capital in the United
States, and management and organization flexibility. Those things probably have more to
do with America’s growth miracle than technology per se, although that is also important.
A big feature of this idea in the United States, I think it’s distinguishing, is that we have a
very rich entrepreneurial culture. If you think about innovation in the past several decades
in the United States, you see a coexistence of very large companies with a lot of very
important incremental innovation, and at the same time a very large and prominent cadre
of entrepreneurs who in the 20th century developed everything from the airplane to frozen
food to the zipper—everything from A to Z—at the same time our domestic large
companies were doing very well.
But there really isn’t a unique American model. Much of what we call this American
model is in fact, like many if not most things in our country, borrowed, and borrowed in
large part from British law, legal systems, institutional systems. But we have a very rich
adaptation of it in the United States that comes from an emphasis on property rights, from
the rule of law, from letting entrepreneurs keep most of the fruits from their innovation,
and very, very importantly, openness to competition here in the country and outside. I’m
going to come back to that.
There’s a question about whether the American model should be right for the world. Let
me start off by saying at one level, gosh it really ought to be. If you were to look at
growth since the Second World War, the United States and certain other very large
industrial economies have experienced the best of the world’s growth prospects. And
we’re argued to receive the vast bulk of the benefits going forward.
One reason that is, if you look at a lot of emerging markets, it’s the case that these
institutions for law and finance are only poorly there. Entrepreneurs have to self-finance.
Even quite large enterprises have to have amazingly concentrated ownership structures
because diversification is very, very difficult. It’s hard to commit to outside suppliers of
funds if you don’t have the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts. The cost of
capital for investment is very high, and growth is very low.
Now on the one hand, that should sound like, well gosh, if that’s what’s going on, it
ought to be obvious. If we’ve got the institutions and high growth, and [there are] other
countries with perhaps weaker institutions and low growth, go back to that question I led
off with, why aren’t we reaching out?
An example here is a very popular work most of you have probably seen in recent years
by Hernando De Soto that has argued that all we need to do is enfranchise the very poor
around the world with property rights and we’d be home. And that builds a lot on this
intuition as I’ve said. Economists are fond of saying there are no $100 bills on the
sidewalk. Politicians like $100 bills on the sidewalk because they’re easy.
So it must be something that’s standing in the way. Part of what we think we know that’s
standing in the way are very powerful interest groups that benefit from the current
system. One of the reasons the United States is having such extraordinary success is that
domestic interest groups really are held in check by a by-and-large very open system.
That system is not necessarily the case outside the United States.
That brings me to my third point that I said was arguably the most important: Why do we
see this under attack in America? The market—the genius of competition, all of these
benefits that I’ve described—has very few constituents. If you think about the interest
group pressures in Washington, the arguments people make in major segments of the
business community, they are often not about the market per se but about individual
advantage. That’s perfectly okay, that’s the way we should be doing it. But we have to
remember, it’s the market itself and this openness that’s the fount of this great economic
growth.
In the United States, we are seeing a very rich debate, if you watch Lou Dobbs
periodically, on the flexibility of American business and whether or not the flexibility of
American business — the particular phenomenon that is often on television is offshoring
— is in the country’s interest. I think I would speak for most economists in arguing that it
is unambiguously in the country’s interest. And it has been a big source of gains for our
country.
But we also have to remember that the support for markets is in essence a political
support. It is not just what we believe as business people or as economists. It’s the
political support that probably means making sure we have the right programs for people
who lose.
We’re seeing the American system challenged from within in other ways too. Corporate
accounting scandals have disturbed many ordinary people’s faith in the system. And that
must be changed. We have seen risk-taking itself being challenged. There are many bills,
as you have seen, floating around in the Congress that would almost demonize the taking
of risk. All of these things that are absolutely central to our success are under attack
frankly more here than they are largely outside the United States. And these are big issues
that we need to discuss.
Now I said I would try to pull this together too in thinking about business education. I
think American graduate education, whether it’s PhD programs in technical areas or in
business schools, has played a very substantial role in this entrepreneurial culture. In U.S.
business education, and thankfully a great deal here at Columbia, it’s not just an emphasis
on technical mastery of material, although you probably all remember late nights
cramming. It’s more about, and you see in your lives it’s more about, thinking outside the
box and the tolerance for openness and heterodox thinking. That’s what’s made
American business education great.
The reason that I’m very excited about American business education is largely the same
reason that I’m excited about the American model and its implication for the world. I
believe this kind of real flexibility, whether it’s in finance, whether it’s in management,
whether it’s the way we organize our workforce around the world, is where it’s at.
Charles Calomiris, Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions
I’ll try to add to and build on what Glenn said by casting us back a little farther in time. I
want to pose the question, What do we know about the last thousand years of human
history that can help us answer the question, what’s the magic formula for countries to
get rich?
I wrote a small book on this topic, and the first thing that you have to recognize, and I
think it’s a big surprise, is what a small club it is of countries that are rich. That club,
until the 1870s, consisted basically of Western Europe and what are typically called the
British offshoot countries, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In the
late nineteenth century, by the beginning of the twentieth century, another country joins
the club, Japan. More recently, you could argue that there are a few other countries,
former Japanese colonies, Korea and Taiwan, that you might say either have joined the
club or are about to.
But it’s a very small group. In fact, now, the interesting question is whether that group is
going to get a lot larger over the next couple of decades by China actually breaking its
way into the group. And of course if they can maintain their 9-percent-plus growth rates
and manage to achieve what we call a soft landing with those very torrid growth rates,
then maybe they will too.
So the first fact is, it’s a very small group. So what do these success stories have in
common? I think Glenn’s right to identify entrepreneurship as a key element, and the
ingredients that he identified are, I think, the right ones. So I want to ask, where does
entrepreneurship come from? I want to emphasize two elements. Rather than talk about
the American system as the model, especially since I’m looking back on a thousand years
before America was in existence really, I would like to emphasize that the American
adaptation of these ingredients is extreme, but that in fact these ingredients have been
around for a long time.
The two that seem most important to me are, first, establishing an open society. I don’t
just mean open to trade and open to capital flows. What I mean is open to external
influence and competition, open to people from all over, open to new ideas, open to
creative minds that may be misfits in other societies. Britain by the way, in the Industrial
Revolution, because it was an open society, attracted inventors from all over Europe who
really couldn’t operate the way they wanted to in their home countries but found Britain a
very hospitable place. Open societies base promotion and advancement on merit.
So the first ingredient, I think, is an open society. And again I want to emphasize, that
doesn’t have to do just with the ability to pursue your comparative advantage in trade or
your access to capital markets. It’s a mindset of openness that seeks to influence others
and to be influenced by others.
I want to read you a brief quote that the famous classical economist John Stuart Mill said
about openness: “The economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance
by those of its effects, which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate
the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in
contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action
unlike those with which they are familiar. Commerce is now what war once was, the
principal source of that contact. There is no nation which does not need to borrow from
others not merely particular acts or practices but essential points of character in which its
own type is inferior.”
The second ingredient, which Glenn also pointed to, is good institutions. I think the key
institutions are really of two types: one, legal institutions that enforce a rule of law; and
two, capital institutions, that is, institutions that allow capital to be guided efficiently
according to its best use.
Entrepreneurs, in other words, need a game with clear rules, and they need to be able to
access sources of finance that reward their excellence. When openness and strong legal
and financial institutions are lacking, other advantages — technology, supply of savings,
abundant natural resources — simply do not create wealth. That is the interesting fact of
the last thousand years. Let me give you some examples.
China’s average per capita wealth remained close to subsistence level throughout the
period of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, which saw per capita income in
Western Europe rise to a level roughly seven times as high. This is prior to World War I.
In the years just prior to World War I, Western Europe reaches a level of per capita
wealth about seven times China’s.
This is sometimes called the European Miracle. That phrase was coined by Eric Jones in
a book that sought to explain why Europe got to be so wealthy while countries like China
or India didn’t. What’s really interesting is this was not a technological superiority. China
had printing, iron-making, paper production, water power, gunpowder, navigation, ship
building and water-powered textile spinning technology hundreds of years prior to their
development in the West.
Why didn’t China get rich? China limited property rights and land, so that you couldn’t
really own land and really transfer land and therefore had very little incentive to develop
land. Authority over commerce was centralized in the empire and in the person of the
emperor, and the emperor didn’t see a personal incentive and therefore lacked an interest
in external contact with other countries or promoting internal commerce and wealth
accumulation. In fact, the emperor quite wisely saw those as potential threats to the
emperor’s dominance. And so because there was a lack of political competition within
the Chinese empire, there was a lack of a need for the people in charge to look outward
and to create an open society, or to create the institutions that would allow property rights
and entrepreneurship to thrive.
Now contrast that with Europe, where political competition propelled economic
competition. And that political competition among sovereigns led them to search for new
advantages and new conquests and the creation of new kinds of economic tools. Of
course, in the Middle Ages that took the form of cities which became a vehicle for
freeing serfs throughout Western Europe. In the New Modern Era, in the sixteenth
century, that became embodied in partnerships between sovereigns and merchants to try
to take over the world as part of the mercantilist-imperialist goal. And then finally, as
those lands became settled, that became a power sharing, not just with newly freed serfs
in the Middle Ages, not just with the merchant class in the Early Modern Period, but now
with settlers who had to be given rights and incentives to develop new lands, including
the lands that we happen to be sitting in.
So that competition among the sovereigns in Europe drove competition economically and
drove power sharing and individual rights. The legal system protecting individual rights
evolved alongside those individual opportunities to meet the needs of the market system.
The second important development was the development of financial intermediaries, and
later financial markets, which developed to support the competing enterprises that had
come into existence as a result of those open societies that we’re talking about.
In an interesting historical inversion, China is now the model for development in Asia,
based on what I would call a fairly open society seeking to catch up with the West by
adopting markets and technology and by fostering entrepreneurship. They’re catching up
pretty quickly and adopting favorable institutions that are going to make that happen.
But just as interesting is that outside of China, the Chinese ethnic group has become the
richest and the most powerful ethnic group in Asia. In Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore,
and elsewhere, Chinese ethnics seem to be a very dominant group. Why is that? That is,
why is it that the Chinese diaspora has become what I would say is unquestionably the
single most powerful ethnic group in Asia?
Well, there are many explanations. One that I think is interesting to think about is, we
have very entrepreneurial risk-taking kind of people who leave a country seeking to flee
oppression and to find new opportunity, so they’re sort of pre-adapted to be very
entrepreneurial people. Also, they’re combining the strengths of different backgrounds
and experiences, coming from their Chinese cultural background and entering other
countries. Something that you may not even be aware of is how strong that Chinese
influence is in Asia. Because for example, the dominant business class in Thailand have
adopted Thai names but they’re mainly Chinese in origin. In fact, it’s a secret I’ll let out
that the prime minister of Thailand is Chinese.
So I think what we’re seeing in Asia right now is a very entrepreneurial class of people,
both within China and outside of China, and interestingly — maybe even puzzlingly —
largely Chinese nationality, that are transforming Asia. And Asia is certainly the place
where wealth accumulation seems to be the most powerful and interesting of all the
regions to look at.
Now the key challenge of the next decade for China, and for many of the Asian
economies that are on the verge of becoming wealthy, will be to see if they can create a
successful system for allocating capital through banks and capital markets at arm’s
length. That is the institutional bottleneck that right now is a big question mark for
whether Asia and particularly China and the East Asian countries are going to join this
exclusive club of the wealthy. The problem of follow-through in development in many
otherwise successful countries has been the difficulty in creating competitive banking
systems in particular.
Crony capitalism in Asia and elsewhere has produced government-protected banks that
are often captives of powerful business monopolies or conglomerates. In East Asia in the
1980s and 1990s, these banks mobilized vast amounts of savings but did so very poorly
and very inefficiently in loss-making enterprises — loss-making enterprises that
happened to be favored politically. That produced the productivity growth slowdown in
the 1980s and the 1990s in the erstwhile very successful East Asian economies. That
productivity growth slowdown underlay what were called the twin crises in Asia in 1997.
That is, the collapse of their banking systems and the collapse of their exchange rate
regimes. Both are directly traceable to the productivity growth slowdown particularly
relative to the currency they were pegged to, the U.S. [dollar], which was experiencing,
as Glenn pointed out, a productivity acceleration that was unprecedented and has been
sustained.
So I leave you with a question. Whether China and whether East Asia will join this
exclusive club will depend in large part on whether they can be — I won’t say American,
but I’ll just say if they can find those institutional prerequisites and get it right. And that,
in particular, the one that’s the big question mark is developing financial institutions that
guide resources efficiently and provide real entrepreneurial opportunity, rather than
become part of a loss-making political crony kind of system.
Robert Hodrick, Nomura Professor of International Finance
I was asked to talk about: is the American model right for capital markets and foreign
exchange markets of other countries? Before I address that question, it’s always good to
review a little theory and develop some historical perspective. From theory, we learn that
a country cannot have fixed exchange rates, open, unrestricted capital markets and an
independent monetary policy. Attempts to violate this maxim are doomed to failure. As a
consequence, how has the United States responded to this situation? Let’s take a quick
look at U.S. and world history to get some perspective.
As the world began to industrialize and transportation costs fell, major countries of the
world adopted fixed exchange rates and open capital markets. These policies were the
hallmark of the pre-World War I era known as the gold standard. During this period,
active international capital markets and considerable foreign investment fostered growth
and development around the world. World War I interrupted this growth and the
Depression sealed its fate.
Now the Depression is often viewed as an extreme failure of monetary policy. And this
gave rise to the desire to have independent monetary policies in different countries. These
desires by sovereign governments to set their own interest rates and the inability of the
governments to cooperate internationally led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed
exchange rate system in 1971. Since then, the United States has opted for open capital
markets and conducted an independent monetary policy while allowing dollar exchange
rates to be set on foreign exchange markets.
How has the situation evolved in the United States since then? U.S. investors are free to
invest anywhere in the world, and foreigners are free to buy U.S. assets. U.S. citizens get
to diversify their portfolios internationally. We buy everything from Nokia equity to
emerging market debt. U.S. multinational corporations seek profit opportunities around
the world. They build factories in Mexico and China. Citigroup has offices in over 120
countries around the world. They even outsource call centers to India.
Foreigners, on the other hand, invest in U.S. government debt. They buy U.S. corporate
bonds and equity. They purchase real estate in the United States. Honda, Toyota,
Daimler-Benz and BMW all produce cars in the United States.
So there’s a lot of two-way flow between the different countries. U.S. corporations lower
their cost of capital by tapping international markets, and foreigners clearly like to invest
here.
Here are some facts: U.S. residents own over $7 trillion of foreign assets, and foreign
residents own over $9 trillion of U.S. assets. Some observers of the situation say that as a
consequence, the U.S. is the world’s largest debtor nation. Of course this is an inaccurate
description of the situation because the assets that the foreigners are purchasing are not
just debts. It’s more accurate to say that the U.S. is the country with the largest negative
net international investment position. It’s a big negative position and it’s getting bigger.
The annual U.S. current account deficit is now over $600 billion. This is the excess of the
U.S. purchase of goods and services from the rest of the world over their purchases of our
goods and services. The counterpart of this current account deficit is a capital account
surplus, which involves additional net purchases of U.S. assets. Foreigners purchase of
$2.4 billion of U.S. assets every business day.
Is this a problem? Does it represent a crisis waiting to happen? I don’t think so. The
dollar has weakened substantially over the course of the last year, but it’s hardly in
freefall. Yields on the bond market are as low as they were in the 1950s. If there were a
crisis brewing, this would be where it would start.
One interesting observation is that we’re actually being propped up by the willingness of
China and Japan to purchase government bonds. So the policymakers in China and Japan
are trying to limit the appreciation of their currencies, and in China’s case, they’re fixing
the exchange rate. In Japan’s case they’re trying to limit the appreciation of the yen. As a
consequence, these countries have purchased over $240 billion of U.S. government bonds
in the last year.
No one denies that if these foreign policies were to reverse, or if these countries were to
suddenly decide to diversify their international reserves and dump large quantities of
government bonds that yields would not rise in the United States. They certainly would.
But the world would not end, and clearly the markets don’t seem to think this is going to
happen, and neither do I.
So we’ve had enormous benefits of open international capital markets in the United
States, and I want to articulate where these benefits come from. I’ve already mentioned
two and they provide a related benefit to the economy.
A fundamental tenet of international finance, or domestic finance for that matter, is that
investors in capital markets set the required rates of return on corporate bonds and
equities. And this in turn determines the corporations’ cost of capital. The key insight is
that international portfolio investment allows investors to increase diversification, and
this provides an improved risk-return tradeoff for domestic investors. Which in turn leads
to a lower cost of capital for the country’s firms. A lower cost of capital leads to more
investment, higher productivity and more growth.
Those who argue against open capital markets point to the financial crises in Mexico,
Asia, Russia and Argentina as evidence that free international capital markets don’t work.
And yes, I’m not arguing that there are not speculative capital flows, but I think that
virtually in all of these crises, they all arise from inconsistencies in government policies
and are thus ultimately avoidable.
The Mexican crisis was a classic case of an attempt to violate the maxim that I articulated
in the beginning of the talk. Mexico tried to have an independent monetary policy, open
capital markets and an exchange rate that depreciated on a pre-announced schedule that
the government wanted to follow. When Mexican authorities were running out of
international reserves, they announced that there would be a small devaluation of the
peso. Well, you can’t turn your back on international capital markets without getting
punished, and as a result, there was a severe depreciation of the peso that was
exacerbated by capital flight out of Mexico.
The Asian crisis is more complicated, but ultimately, I would argue that a tax on
currencies can ultimately be traced to correct investor perceptions that governments are
willing to engage in inflationary finance if their currencies are attacked. Having open
capital markets isn’t easy because foreign investors must watch the currency markets, as
well as assessing the prospects for repayment of interest and principal and the growth
opportunities of firms in the countries.
There are lots of ways the countries can make mistakes. Local banks borrow dollars
internationally and make dollar-denominated loans to local corporations and real estate
developers. The banks argue that they’re hedged against foreign exchange risk because
their dollar assets equal their dollar liabilities. But when a crisis develops, it becomes
apparent that the loans cannot be repaid because the local corporations do not have the
dollars to repay the banks. The government inevitably steps in to save the banks, and
resorts to inflationary finance. Investors, seeing this, quickly have a run against the
currency.
But having open capital markets does not mean forgetting about prudential supervision of
the banking system. There’s a lot of moral hazard in capital markets and government
policies must be designed to be robust to its presence.
Let me close by returning to my opening statement that a country cannot have an
independent monetary policy, open capital markets and a fixed exchange rate. Of these, I
think open capital markets are far and away the most important, and an independent
monetary policy is actually the least important. I would argue that most countries should
have open capital markets and fixed exchange rates, but there are lots of other
government policies that countries must get right if they are to have the benefits of these
two policies.
My advice is different from the situation in the United States, where we have an open
capital market and an independent monetary policy. It’s the size of the country that
dictates the difference. The countries that have joined the Euro zone are not
homogeneous, and there are problems within this Euro zone, but the gains from
efficiency in having a common currency are big, and they’re still being realized.
The world is a big enough place that we will need several major currencies — certainly
the dollar, yen and the Euro — for the foreseeable future. Other countries should peg
their currencies to one of these currencies. They sacrifice monetary sovereignty, but they
gain access to international capital, and I think that’s really important.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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