亚美体育app|信息技术与新型全球化

Every newspaper picture editor knows the score. If it’s a story about trade, it gets illustrated with a photo of a gargantuan cargo ship piled high with containers. And every amateur apostle of the free market, along with a few government ministers, knows that all you need to do to win an argument about trade is to cite the theory of comparative advantage and you’re pretty much done.任何一位报纸图片编辑都告诉这个套路。如果这是一篇有关贸易的报导，与之配上的图片就应当展现出一艘极大的货轮，船上集装箱头顶堆起。

任何一位自由市场的业余倡导者以及一些政府部门的部长也都告诉，要想要在有关贸易的争辩中取得胜利，你只必须提到一下较为优势理论。Much public understanding about trade and globalisation is either scant or trapped in models and realities that owe more to the 20th century, and sometimes the 19th, than to today. At a moment when the downsides of trade and globalisation are cited as causes of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of rightwing populism in Europe, getting the analysis right is a matter of rather more than academic interest.公众对贸易和全球化的了解要么短缺，要么溃在模型或实例中回头不出来，而且这些模型或实例一般来说更加多体现的是二十世纪、有时甚至是十九世纪的情况，而非当下的现实。

鉴于贸易和全球化的负面影响在当下被用于说明英国干欧、唐纳德特朗普(Donald Trump)被选为美国总统以及右翼民粹主义在欧洲蓬勃发展的原因，展开准确的分析就某种程度是学术界感兴趣的问题了。Enter, with exemplary timing, this excellent book by Richard Baldwin, an academic with a strong applied focus, who combines a professorship at the Graduate Institute in Geneva with the presidency of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a renowned network of economists.这本来自理查德鲍德温(Richard Baldwin)的杰作对上市时间的做到可谓典范。鲍德温是一位高度重视研究现实问题的学者，他是日内瓦国际研究所(Graduate Institute in Geneva)的教授，同时还是经济政策研究中心(Centre for Economic Policy Research)的主席。

后者是一个极具声望的经济学家联盟。For its time and as far as it goes, the 19th-century theory of comparative advantage is fine. Countries specialise in what they are relatively good at: high-wage and capital-rich 19th-century Europe did higher-technology industry, poorer countries such as India did agriculture and small-scale manufactures. Thus, given the productivity gains in manufacturing, began the “Great Divergence” that meant the richer countries pulling away from the rest.就其所产生的年代及其所辩论的深度而言，问世于19世纪的较为优势理论是很好的。国家不应专心于自身比较擅长于的领域：例如十九世纪时低工资、资本充足的欧洲国家就大力发展了技术含量较高的工业，印度等收益较低的国家就主要发展农业和小型制造业。

因此，在制造业生产率提高的影响下，“大分化”(Great Divergence)再次发生了，而这意味著低收益国家相对于世界其他地区的领先优势拉大。But Baldwin’s analysis notes this was only one form of globalisation. His framework posits three “cascading constraints” that hold back the globalisation of markets, namely the costs of moving goods, ideas and people. Initially, all were bundled together: early societies stayed where they were, passed down information to the next generation and ate what they grew. The first wave of globalisation that created the Great Divergence expanded markets via the falling cost of transporting physical goods, thanks to the steamship and the railway.但鲍德温的分析认为，这只是全球化的一种表现形式。他的分析框架明确提出了三种妨碍市场全球化的“逐级连贯容许”，即货物运输成本、观念传播成本以及人员流动成本。最初这三种成本是混合在一起的：在早期社会形态中，人们完全不怎么离开了居住地，把信息传送给下一代，不吃的也是自己栽种生产的食物。

造成了“大分化”的第一波全球化浪潮通过减少实体货物运输成本扩展了市场空间，这主要得益于蒸汽船和铁路的经常出现。But the globalisation that began around 1990 and led to the astonishing rise — in fact, re-emergence — of China and other emerging market giants reflected a relaxation of the constraint on ideas. Digitisation and communications allowed the monitoring and control of supply chains that had previously been bundled together in one economy to be split up into dozens or hundreds of stages, which were then allocated to producers around the globe according to efficiency and cost.而始自1990年前后、推展了中国和其他主要新兴市场经济体兴起——更加精确的说道是新的兴起——的那一轮全球化浪潮体现了容许观念传播因素的放开。数字化以及现代通讯使得监督控制供应链的过程可以分散化，将过去集中于在一个经济体境内的生产线拆分为数十道甚至上百道工序，并根据成本和效率指标分发给世界各地的生产商。

Baldwin describes very well how this changes the simple country-by-country focus of comparative advantage, with some real-world case studies. South Korea, for example, shifted from its original model of operating an entire car industry at home to setting up an international automotive supply chain. With production processes being broken up into individual pieces and tasks, the sophistication goes to finer degrees. Some groups of workers, who can provide the necessary skills for the cheapest rate, prosper; some languish. Manufacturing sectors in rich countries require workers with very different skills, historically more typical of the service sector, such as management and design.鲍德温出众刻画了这新情况是如何转变各个国家全然侧重于本国较为优势的作法的，并对一些现实案例展开了辩论。例如，韩国转变了最初在国内运营一整条汽车生产线的模式，转而建设国际化的汽车供应链。随着生产流程被刺穿出了一个个单一任务，简单的生产过程转入了一个更为细致的阶段。部分工人群体发展壮大——他们能以低于的工资获取适当的技能；部分群体渐渐式微。

低收益国家的制造业部门必须工人不具备十分有所不同的技能，例如管理和设计能力，而过去对这些技能的拒绝多见于服务业。Just as South Korea has changed, so newly industrialising countries are less keen on setting up entire industries at home and instead try to insert themselves into global supply chains. Sometimes this means changing, not just exploiting, their comparative advantage. Baldwin cites Vietnam, which joined Honda’s supply network by starting to manufacture motorcycle parts using production and technical expertise imported from the parent company. Thus Vietnam’s existing advantage of low-cost labour joined with the management and technical know-how of Japan to create a new specialism. Those economies that succeed can grow very quickly, producing a “Great Convergence” of poor and rich that provides the book’s title.正如韩国的改变一样，其他新兴工业化国家也仍然那么意图把整个产业都布局在国内，而是企图引领本国企业带入全球供应链。有时这意味著这些国家必须转变自身的较为优势、而某种程度是利用。鲍德温荐了越南的例子，该国重新加入了本田(Honda)的供应网络，开始运用引入自本田母公司的生产技术生产摩托车零部件。

由此，越南现有的低成本劳动力优势与日本的管理和技术经验融合在了一起，建构出有了一种新的专长。那些获得成功的经济体力以迅速的速度快速增长，进而造成了穷国和富国之间的“大融合”(Great Convergence)，这也正是鲍德温这本书的书名。This framework explains a lot about current tensions around globalisation. For one, the stricken manufacturing towns of the American Midwest, many of whose poorer inhabitants switched to voting for Donald Trump, have experienced first-hand what it feels like rapidly to become a redundant link in a global value chain. (Much of this also owes to changing technology, not trade, but as the US trade representative Michael Froman is fond of saying, no one gets a vote on technology.)这个框架能从很多方面说明当前环绕全球化的紧绷氛围。其一是，美国中西部地区不受冲击的制造业城镇——这些地方的大量低收入居民将选票投给了唐纳德特朗普——亲身感受到了在全球价值链中很快显得多余的滋味。

（这种变化在相当大程度上是由技术变革而非贸易造成的，但正如美国贸易代表迈克弗罗曼(Mike Froman)讨厌说道的那样，人们无法对技术展开投票。）Second, it shows why modern trade deals, such as the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and EU, are centred on rules protecting patents and copyrights, and allowing foreign corporations to sue governments if they feel their investments are being expropriated. Multinationals are less concerned with goods tariffs, which are now generally low and belong to an earlier era of trade governance, than they are with trying to protect the specialist knowledge on which their global supply chains depend.其二是，该框架展现出了现代贸易协议——例如美国与欧盟之间仍在谈判的《横跨大西洋贸易与投资伙伴关系协议》(Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership)——为何把重点放到了维护专利和版权的规则，以及容许外国企业在指出自身投资被挪用的情况下控告政府的规则。相比目前总体正处于较低水平、归属于贸易管制时代之物的商品关税，跨国公司如今更加关心的是维护自己的全球供应链所差异性的专业知识。

It also foresees the future of globalisation once technology has relaxed the third constraint, the movement of people. The easier it becomes to manage processes from afar — improved videoconferencing, remote-controlled robots — the more virtual immigration can substitute for actual and the specialisation of global supply chains proceed even faster.该书还预测了在科技发展放开了对人员流动的容许之后全球化的未来南北。远程管理生产流程显得就越更容易——例如依赖更佳的视频会议技术或远程操控机器人——虚拟世界人员迁入就越是需要替换实际迁入，全球供应链将以比以往更慢的速度南北专门化。Baldwin’s work seems likely to become a standard, perhaps indispensable, guide to understanding how globalisation has got us here and where it is likely to take us next. There can be few more vital subjects today that will benefit from this sort of clear and comprehensive exposition.鲍德温的这本著作很有可能将沦为协助我们解读全球化如何率领我们回头到现在、以及下一步将引导我们南北何方的标准读物，甚至有可能是参考书之书。就当前而言，在需要获益于这种明晰而全面的阐述的议题中，没几个比起全球化议题更加最重要了。

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, by Richard Baldwin, Harvard University Press, RRP22.95/$29.95, 344 pages《大融合：信息技术与新型全球化》(The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization),理查德鲍德温著，哈佛大学出版社(Harvard University Press)，建议零售价22.95英镑/29.。

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