Why Economic Forecasts Fail

FOREIGN AFFAIRS January/February 2014 COMMENT The Ever-Emerging Markets Why Economic Forecasts Fail Ruchir Sharma RUCHIR SHARMA is head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and the author of Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles. In the middle of the last decade, the average growth rate in emerging markets hit over seven percent a year for the first time ever, and forecasters raced to hype the implications. China would soon surpass the United States as an economic power, they said, and India, with its vast population, or Vietnam, with its own spin on authoritarian capitalism, would be the next China. Searching for the political fallout, pundits predicted that Beijing would soon lead the new and rising bloc of the BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- to ultimate supremacy over the fading powers of the West. Suddenly, the race to coin the next hot acronym was on, and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa) emerged from the MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey). Today, more than five years after the financial crisis of 2008, much of that euphoria and all those acronyms have come to seem woefully out of date. The average growth rate in the emerging world fell back to four percent in 2013. Meanwhile, the BRICs are crumbling, each for its own reasons, and while their summits go on, they serve only to underscore how hard it is to forge a meaningful bloc out of authoritarian and democratic regimes with clashing economic interests. As the hype fades, forecasters are left reconsidering the mistakes they made at the peak of the boom. Their errors were legion. Prognosticators stopped looking at emerging markets as individual stories and started lumping them into faceless packs with catchy but mindless acronyms. They listened too closely to political leaders in the emerging world who took credit for the boom and ignored the other global forces, such as easy money coming out of the United States and Europe, that had helped power growth. Forecasters also placed far too much predictive weight on a single factor -- strong demographics, say, or globalization -- when every shred of research shows that a complex array of forces drive economic growth. Above all, they made the cardinal error of extrapolation. Forecasters assumed that recent trends would continue indefinitely and that hot economies would stay hot, ignoring the inherently cyclical nature of both political and economic development. Euphoria overcame sound judgment -- a process that has doomed economic forecasting for as long as experts have been doing it. SINGLE-FACTOR SYNDROME History shows that straight-line extrapolations are almost always wrong. Yet pundits cannot seem to resist them, lured on by wishful thinking and fear. In the 1960s, the Philippines won the right to host the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank based on the view that its fast growth at the time would make the country a regional star for years to come. That was not to be: by the next decade, growth had stalled thanks to the misguided policies of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos (but the Asian Development Bank stayed put). Yet the taste for extrapolation persisted, and in the 1970s, such thinking led U.S. scholars and intelligence agencies to predict that the future belonged to the Soviet Union, and in the 1980s, that it belonged to Japan. Then came the emerging-market boom of the last decade, and extrapolation hit new heights of irrationality. Forecasters cited the seventeenth-century economic might of China and India as evidence that they would dominate the coming decade, even the coming century. The boom also highlighted another classic forecasting error: the reliance on single-factor theories. Because China’s boom rested in part on the cheap labor provided by a growing young population, forecasters started looking for the next hot economy in a nation with similar demographics -- never mind the challenge of developing a strong manufacturing sector to get everyone a job. There were the liberals, for whom the key was more transparent institutions that encouraged entrepreneurship -- despite the fact that in the postwar era, periods of strong growth have been no more likely under democratic governments than under authoritarian ones. And then there were the moralizers, for whom debt is always bad (a bias reinforced by the 2008 credit crisis), even though economic growth and credit go hand in hand. The problem with these single-factor theories is that they lack any connection to current events or an appreciation for the other factors that make each country unique. On the one hand, institutions and demographics change too slowly to offer any clear indication of where an economy is headed. On the other, those forecasters who have argued that certain national cultures are good or bad for growth miss how quickly culture can change. Consider Indonesia and Turkey, large Muslim-majority democracies where strong growth has debunked the view of Islam as somehow incompatible with development. Sweeping theories often miss what is coming next. Those who saw geography as the key factor failed to foresee the strong run of growth during the last decade in some of the most geographically challenged nations on earth, including landlocked countries such as Armenia, Tajikistan, and Uganda. In remote Kazakhstan, rising oil prices lifted the economy out of its long post-Soviet doldrums. The clarity of single-factor theories makes them appealing. But because they ignore the rapid shifts of global competition, they provide no persuasive scenario on which to base planning for the next five to ten years. The truth is that economic cycles are short, typically running just three to five years from peak to trough. The competitive landscape can shift completely in that time, whether through technological innovation or political transformation. HERE AND NOW Indeed, although forecasters hate to admit it, the coming decade usually looks nothing like the last one, since the next economic stars are often the last decade’s castoffs. Today, for example, formerly stagnant Mexico has become one of the most promising economies in Latin America. And the Philippines, once a laughingstock, is now among the hottest economies in the world, with growth exceeding seven percent. Dismissed on the cover of The Economist five years ago as “the world’s most dangerous place,” Pakistan is suddenly showing signs of financial stability. It had one of the world’s top-performing stock markets last year, although it is being surpassed by an even more surprising upstart: Greece. A number of market indices recently demoted Greece’s status from “developed market” to “emerging market,” but the country has enacted brutal cuts in its government budget, as well as in prices and wages, which has made its exports competitive again. What these countries’ experiences underscore is that political cycles are as important to a nation’s prospects as economic ones. Crises and downturns often lead to a period of reform, which can flower into a revival or a boom. But such success can then lead to arrogance and complacency -- and the next downturn. The boom of the last decade seemed to revise that script, as nearly all the emerging nations rose in unison and downturns all but disappeared. But the big bang of 2008 jolted the cycle back into place. Erstwhile stars such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia are now fading thanks to bad or complacent management. The problem, as Indonesia’s finance minister, Muhammad Chatib Basri, has explained, is that “bad times make for good policies, and good times make for bad policies." The trick to escaping this trap is for governments to maintain good policies even when times are good -- the only way an emerging market has a chance of actually catching up to the developed world. But doing so proves remarkably difficult. In the postwar era, just about a dozen countries -- a few each in southern Europe (such as Portugal and Spain) and East Asia (such as Singapore and South Korea) -- have achieved this feat, which is why a mere 35 countries are considered to be “developed.” Meanwhile, the odds are against many other states’ making it into the top tier, given the difficulty of keeping up productivity-enhancing reforms. It is simply human nature to get fat during prosperity and assume the good times will just roll on. More often than not, success proves fleeting. Argentina, Greece, and Venezuela all reached Western income levels in the last century but then fell back. Today, in addition to Mexico and the Philippines, Peru and Thailand are making their run. These four nations share a trait common to many star economies of recent decades: a charismatic political leader who understands economic reform and has the popular mandate to get it enacted. Still, excitement should be tempered. Such reformist streaks tend to last three to five years. So don’t expect the dawn of a Filipino or a Mexican century. BALANCING ACT If forecasters need to think small in terms of time, they need to think big when it comes to complexity. To sustain rapid growth, leaders must balance a wide range of factors, and the list changes as a country grows richer. Simple projects, such as paving roads, can do more to boost a poor economy than a premature push to develop cutting-edge technologies, but soon the benefits of basic infrastructure run their course. The list of factors to watch also changes with economic conditions. Five years after the global financial crisis, too much credit is still a critical problem, particularly if it grows faster than GDP. Indeed, too much credit is weighing down emerging economies, such as China, which have been running up debt to maintain economic growth. Once touted as the next China, Vietnam has in fact beaten China to the endgame, but not the one it expected: Vietnam has already suffered a debt-induced economic meltdown and is only now beginning to pick up the pieces and shutter its insolvent banks. To keep their economies humming, leaders need to make sure growth is balanced across national accounts (not too dependent on borrowing), social classes (not concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires), geographic regions (not hoarded in the capital), and productive industries (not focused in corruption-prone industries such as oil). And they must balance all these factors at a point that is appropriate for their countries’ income levels. For example, Brazil is spending too much to build a welfare state too large for a country with an average income of $11,000. Meanwhile, South Korea, a country with twice the average income of Brazil, is spending too little on social programs. Many leaders see certain economic vices as timeless, generic problems of development, but in reality, there is a balancing point even for avarice and venality. Inequality tends to rise in the early stages of economic growth and then plateau before it begins to fall, typically at around the $5,000 per capita income level. On this curve, inequality relative to income level is much higher than the norm in Brazil and South Africa, but it is right in line with the norm -- and therefore much less worrisome -- in Poland and South Korea. The same income-adjusted approach also applies to corruption and shows, for example, that Chile is surprisingly clean for its income level, while Russia is disproportionately corrupt. ASK A LOCAL No amount of theory, however, can trump local knowledge. Locals often know which way the economy is turning before it shows up in forecasting numbers. Even before India’s economy started slowing down, Indian businesspeople foretold its slump in a chorus of complaints about corruption at home. The rising cost of bribing government officials was compelling them to invest abroad, although foreign investors still poured in. There is no substitute for getting out and seeing what is happening on the ground. Analysts who focus on dangerously high levels of investment in emerging nations use China as a test case, since investment there is nearly 50 percent of GDP, a level unprecedented in any developed country. But the risk becomes apparent only when one goes to China and sees where all the money is going: into high-rise ghost towns and other empty developments. On the flip side are Brazil and Russia, where anemic investment levels account for grossly underperforming service sectors, inadequate roads, and, in São Paulo, the sight of CEOs who dodge permanently clogged streets by depending on a network of rooftop helipads. Economists tend to ignore the story of people and politics as too soft to quantify and incorporate into forecasting models. Instead, they study policy through hard numbers, such as government spending or interest rates. But numbers cannot capture the energy that a vibrant leader such as Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, or the Philippines’ Benigno Aquino III can unleash by cracking down on monopolists, bribers, and dysfunctional bureaucrats. Any pragmatic approach to spotting the likely winners of the next emerging-market boom should reflect this reality and the fundamentally impermanent state of global competition. A would-be forecaster must track a shifting list of a dozen factors, from politics to credit and investment flows, to assess the growth prospects of each emerging nation over the next three to five years -- the only useful time frame for political leaders, businesspeople, investors, or anyone else with a stake in current events. This approach offers no provocative forecasts for 2100, no prophecies based on the long sweep of history. It aims to produce a practical guide for following the rise and fall of nations in real time and in the foreseeable future: this decade, not the next or those beyond it. It may not be dramatic. But the recent crash highlighted just how dangerous too much drama can be.   Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

A brief history of the Chinese growth model

As regular readers know I have often argued that the Chinese development model is an old one, and can trace its roots at least as far back as the “American System” of the 1820s and 1830s. This “system” was itself based primarily on the works of the brilliant first US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (see especially his report to the Congress on manufacturing and his two reports on public credit and banks).

This development model was also implicitly part of the debate in France that led to one of the most important financial innovations of the 19^th Century, the creation of the Crédit Mobilier in France in 1852. The debate concerned one of the great economic questions in France, especially after the defeat of Napoleon: why had England, a country that one hundred years earlier had been poorer than France, managed to surpass France and all other countries economically and technologically, even though in the pure sciences and engineering the French were at least the equal to the British and perhaps superior?

One obvious reason had to do with the financing of the commercial application of new technology. The French banking system, dominated by rentiers and the landed aristocracy, seemed to specialize in protecting savers, in part by mobilizing capital and investing in gold or in government obligations. The English banking system did this too, but it also seemed much more willing to finance infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

In fact more generally I have argued that the main reason “industrial revolutions” have occurred largely in England and the United States is because industrial revolutions are not driven by scientific developments but rather by the commercial application of scientific developments. For this to happen it seems that a robust financing system is key. England, and the US later, benefitted from a financial system that seemed to do better than others in financing new infrastructure and technological ventures.
A well-functioning financial system, one that allocates capital to new ventures, in other words, may have been the key difference between England and France at the end of the 18^th Century, and for this some historians blame the brilliant but erratic John Law and his Mississippi Bubble. This concern about the inefficient French banking system led to the creation of Crédit Mobilier, whose role was to break the constraints of the existing Rothschild-dominated financial system, mobilize the savings of the middle classes, and allocate these savings towards financial projects, such as infrastructure development, that would, over the longer term lead to more rapid economic development.
I will come back to this issue of the financial system, but the point here is that there have been many versions of this development model, and at least two major economic theoreticians – the German Friedrich List in the 19^thCentury and the Ukrainian-American Alexander Gershenkron in the 20^th – have formally described variations on the investment-driven growth model. Michael Hudson, one of my favorite economic thinkers, wrote twenty years ago a brilliant and provocative book (Trade, Development and Foreign Debt), which traces many aspects of this model to debates in England at the end of the 18^th Century.
Aside from Alexander Hamilton, its intellectual and political godfather, the main proponents of the American System were figures like Henry Clay, Henry and Matthew Cary, John Calhoun, and even Abraham Lincoln himself. Their vision of economic policymaking was looked down upon as naïve and even foolish by most American academic economists – schooled as they were in the laissez faire doctrines then fashionable in England – but I think it is hard for any economic historian not to feel relieved that neither the academics nor the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian factions had the clout to force “good” economic policy onto US development. America got rich in part by doing the wrong things.
Many countries in which the academics had real influence at the time – Chile in the 1860s under the tutelage of the famous French economist Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, for example, or Mexico at the turn of the century under the expert guidance of José Y. Limantour, finance minister under President Porfirio Díaz – never achieved the kind of growth that the less capable student-countries experienced. I write about some of these cases in my 1996 article for Foreign Affairs, for anyone who might be interested.
To get back to the main story, in another, also brilliant and provocative, book (America’s Protectionist Take-off, 1815-1914) Michael Hudson refers to a leading member of the second generation of proponents of the American System, a Columbia University graduate by the name of E. Pechine Smith. What is especially interesting about Smith in the context of China is that in 1872 he was invited to Japan to serve as advisor to the Mikado, becoming the first of a stream of economists and lawyers – most of them proponents of the American System – to advise and help shape Japanese development after the Meiji restoration.
Smith thus creates a direct link between the American System and the Chinese development model. It was of course the post-War Japanese development model, itself based on Japan’s experience of economic development during and after the Meiji restoration, that became the standard for policymakers throughout East Asia and China. I think of China’s growth model as merely a more muscular version of the Japanese or East Asian growth model, which is itself partly based on the American experience.
There were three key elements of the American System. Historian Michael Lind, in one of his economic histories of the United States, described them as:
·      infant industry tariffs
·      internal improvements, and
·      a sound system of national finance
These three elements are at the heart, explicitly or implicitly, of every variation of the investment-led development model adopted by number of countries in the last century – including Germany in the 1930s, the USSR in the early Cold War period, Brazil during the Brazilian miracle, South Korea after the Korean War, Japan before 1990, and China today, to name just the most important and obvious cases. For this reason I think it makes sense to discuss each of them in a little more detail.
Infant industry tariffs
The “infant industry” argument is fairly well known. I believe Alexander Hamilton was the first person to use the phrase, and the reasoning behind his thinking was straightforward. American manufacturing could not compete with the far superior British, and according to the then- (and now) fashionable economic theories based on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the implications for trade policy were obvious. Americans should specialize in areas where they were economically superior to the British – agriculture, for the most part – and economic policy should consist of converting US agriculture to the production of cash crops – tobacco, rice, sugar, wheat and, most importantly, cotton – maximizing that production and exchanging them for cheaper and superior British manufactured items.
In this way, as Ricardo brilliantly proved, and assuming a static distribution of comparative advantages, with each country specializing in its comparative advantage, global production would be maximized and through trade both the British and the Americans would be better off. While most academic US economists and the commodity-producing South embraced free trade, Alexander Hamilton and his followers, mainly in the northeast, did not (in fact differing views over free trade as well as over slavery and state rights were at the heart of the North-South conflict that led eventually to the Civil War).
Hamilton was convinced that it was important for the US to develop its own manufacturing base because, as he explained in his Congressional report in 1791, he believed that productivity growth was likely to be much higher in manufacturing than in agriculture or mineral extraction. Contrary to David Ricardo, in other words, Hamilton believed that comparative advantage was not static and could be forced to change in ways that benefitted less productive countries. What is more, he thought manufacturing could employ a greater variety of people and was not subject to seasonal fluctuations or fluctuations in access to minerals.
Given much higher British efficiency and productivity, which translated into much lower prices even with higher transportation costs, how could Americans compete? They could do it the same way the British did to compete with the superior Dutch a century earlier. The US had to impose tariffs and other measures to raise the cost of foreign manufacturers sufficiently to allow their American counterparts to undersell them in the US market. In addition Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).
This the US did, and in fact I believe every country that has managed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status (with, perhaps, the exception of one or two trading entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong, although even this is debatable), including Germany, Japan, and Korea, has done it behind high explicit or implicit trade tariffs and stolen intellectual property. The idea that countries get rich under conditions of free trade has very little historical support, and it is far more likely that rich countries discover the benefits of free trade only after they get rich, while poor countries that embrace free trade too eagerly (think of Colombia and Chile in the late 19^th century, who were stellar students of economic orthodoxy) almost never get rich unless, like Haiti in the 18^th Century or Kuwait today, they are massive exporters of a very valuable commodity (sugar, in the case of Haiti, which was the richest country in the world per capita during a good part of the late 18^th Century).
But rather than just embrace protection I would add that there is one very important caveat. Many countries have protected their infant industries, and often for many decades, and yet very few have made the transition to developed country status. Understanding why protection “works” in some cases and not in others might have very important implications for China. I won’t pretend to have answered this question fully but I suspect the difference between the countries that saw such rapid productivity growth behind infant industry protection that they were eventually able to compete on their own, and those that didn’t, may have had to do with the structure of domestic competition.
Specifically, it is not enough to protect industry from foreign competition. There must be a spur to domestic innovation, and this spur is probably competition that leads to advances in productivity and management organization. I would argue, for example, that countries that protected domestic industry but allowed their domestic markets to be captured and dominated by national champions were never likely to develop in the way the United States in the 19^th Century.
I would also argue that companies that receive substantial subsidies from the state also fail to develop in the necessary way because rather than force management to improve economic efficiency as a way of overcoming their domestic rivals, these countries encourage managers to compete by trying to gain greater access to those subsidies. Why innovate when it is far more profitable to demand greater subsidies, especially when subsidized companies can easily put innovative companies out of business? Last April, for example, I wrote about plans by Wuhan Iron & Steel, China’s fourth-largest steel producer, to invest $4.7 billion in the pork production industry.
The company’s management argued that they could compete with traditional agro-businesses not because steel makers were somehow more efficient than farmers, but rather because their size and clout made it easier for them to get cheap capital and to get government approvals. They were able to invest in an industry they knew little about, in other words, because they knew they could extract economic rent. This clearly is not a good use of protection.
The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important being cheap and unlimited credit, because senior managers of Chinese companies rationally spend more time on increasing access to these subsidies than on innovation, a subject on which, in spite of the almost absurd hype of recent years, China fares very, very poorly.
There is nothing wrong with protecting domestic industry, but the point is to create an incentive structure that forces increasing efficiency behind barriers of protection. The difficulty, of course, is that trade barriers and other forms of subsidy and protection can become highly addictive, and the beneficiaries, especially if they are national champions, can become politically very powerful. In that case they are likely to work actively both to maintain protection and to limit efficiency-enhancing domestic competition. It was Friedrich Engels, not often seen as a champion of capitalist competition, writing to Edward Bernstein in 1881, who said that “the worst of protection is that when you once have got it you cannot easily get rid of it.”
Internal improvements
The second element of the American System was internal improvement, which today we would probably call infrastructure spending. Proponents of the American System demanded that the national and state governments design, finance and construct canals, bridges, ports, railroads, toll roads, and a wide variety of communication and transportation facilities that would allow businesses to operate more efficiently and profitably. In some cases these projects were paid for directly (tolls, for example) and in other cases they were paid for tax revenues generated by higher levels of economic activity.
It is easy to make a case for state involvement in infrastructure investment. The costs of infrastructure can be very high, while even if the benefits are much higher they are likely to be diffused throughout the economy, making it hard for any individual company to justify absorbing the costs of investment. In this case the state should fund infrastructure investment and pay for it through the higher taxes generated by greater economic activity.
For me the interesting question, especially in the Chinese context, is not whether the state should build infrastructure but rather how much it should build. In fact this is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the whole China debate. Most China bulls implicitly assume that infrastructure spending is always good and the optimal amount of infrastructure is more or less the same for every country, which is what allows them to compare China’s per capita capital stock with that of the US and Japan and conclude that China still has a huge amount of investing to do because its capital stock per capita is so much lower.
But this is completely wrong, and even nonsensical. Infrastructure investment is like any other investment in that it is only economically justified if the total economic value created by the investment exceeds the total economic cost associated with that investment If a country spends more on infrastructure than the resulting increase in productivity, more infrastructure makes it poorer, not richer.
In China we have problems with both sides of the equation. First, we don’t know what the true economic cost of investment in China might be. In order to calculate the true cost we need to add not just the direct costs but also all the implicit and explicit subsidies, most of which are hidden or hard to calculate.
The most important of these subsidies tends to be the interest rate subsidy, and this can be substantial. If interest rates in China are set artificially low by 5 percentage points, for example, which is a reasonable estimate, an investment of $100 million receives an additional subsidy of $5 million for every year that the loan funding the investment is outstanding – and loans are almost never repaid in China. Over ten to twenty years of outstanding debt this can add 30-40% to the initial cost of the investment. This means that the recognized cost of an infrastructure project is much lower than the true economic cost, with the difference being buried in explicit and implicit subsidies.
But the bigger problem is in the value created by the investment. We can think of the value of infrastructure primarily as a function of the value of labor saved. In countries with very low levels of productivity, each hour of labor saved is less valuable than each hour saved in countries with high levels of productivity. For this reason less productive countries should have much lower capital stock per capita than more productive countries.
This should be obvious, but it seems that often it isn’t. When analysts point to high quality infrastructure in China whose quality exceeds comparable infrastructure in rich countries, this is not necessarily a good thing. It might just be an example of the amount of waste you can achieve when spending is heavily subsidized, when there are strong political (or pecuniary) incentives for expanding investment, and when there is limited transparency and accountability.
Other things matter too. If a country has low levels of social capital – if it is hard to set up a business, if less efficient businesses with government connections can successfully compete with more efficient businesses without government connections, if the legal and political structure creates problems in corporate governance (the “agency” problem, especially), if the legal framework is weak, if property rights are not respected, if intellectual property can easily be lost – then much infrastructure spending is likely to be wasted.
In fact it turns that it may be far more efficient to focus on improving, say, the legal framework than to build more airports, even though (and perhaps because) building airports generates more growth (and wealth for the politically connected) today. Weak social capital becomes a constraint on the ability to extract value from infrastructure, and this constraint is very high in poor countries with weak institutional frameworks,
Journey to the West
This issue of how much investment is enough is a very important topic that deserves much more discussion, but I think there is a very good example of why we need to be worried about how useful additional infrastructure investment in China might be. This shows up most clearly in China’s push to create development in the western part of the country.
Often when I question the economic value of China’s push to the western, poorer parts of the country (by the way economic value is not the same as social or political value, the latter of which may nonetheless justify projects that are not economically viable) I am almost always treated with the story of the American West. In the 19^th Century, as everyone knows, the US went west, and most economists agree that this made economic sense for the country and was an important part of the process that led it to becoming the wealthiest and most productive country in history.
But we must be very careful about drawing lessons from the American experience. The US is not the only country in history that “went West”. Several other countries did so too, but for some reason we ignore their experiences altogether when we discuss China. Brazil, for example, went west and north in the 1950s and 1960s as it expanded from the rich southern coastal areas into the Amazon and the Caribbean. The Soviet Union did something similar after the Second World War as it went east into Siberia.
Most economists today agree that the Brazilian and Soviet experiences were economically unsuccessful and left those countries burdened with such enormous debts that they were at least partly to blame for Brazil’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 1970s. It turns out, in other words, that there are both successful and unsuccessful precedents for China’s going west.
What are the differences and how do they apply to China? Again, I can’t say that I can fully understand or explain them, but one major difference leaps out. In the US it was private individuals, seeking profitable opportunities, that led the move into the American West, and government investment followed. In Brazil and the Soviet Union, however, there was little incentive for private individuals to lead the process. It was the government that led, and private businesses followed only because government spending created great opportunities for profit. Once government spending stopped, so did business.
My very preliminary conclusion is that large-scale government ambitions allied to strong political motivation and funded by cheap and easy access to credit can lead very easily to the wrong kinds of investment programs. The US experiences of government investment in the 19^th Century, in other words, may be a very poor precedent for understanding China’s current policy of increasing investment spending, especially in the poor western part of the country.
Brazil and the Soviet Union may be much better precedents. At the very least these gloomier experiences should not be ignored when we think of China’s policies. “Going West” isn’t always a great idea from an economic point of view and has led to at least as many, and probably more, bad outcomes as good outcomes. It is not clear why these lessons cannot possibly be applied to China.
A sound system of national finance
The third pillar of the American System was the creation of an appropriate financial system. But what does that mean? It is hard to describe the American financial system in the 19^th Century as stable and well-functioning. In fact the American banking system was chaotic, prone to crises, mismanaged, and often fraudulent, and yet the US grew very rapidly during that time.
China’s banking system, on the other hand, is far more stable – in fact the favorite cliché of Chinese bankers is that while the system may not be efficient, it is very stable. What makes the Chinese banking system stable, of course, is that it is widely believed that the government stands fully behind the banks. It makes no difference, in other words, how weak the credit allocation decision is, because by controlling credit and the deposit rate, and by limiting alternatives for Chinese savers, the government guarantees both the liquidity and solvency of the banking system. As long as government credibility is intact, the banking system is unlikely to fail.
In that sense you can easily make the case the Chinese banks today are sounder than American banks in the 19^th century. This might bode well for the future of the financial system in the short term, but in the long term it is not clear to me that monetary soundness and financial stability are necessarily correlated with more rapid growth.
I say this because I have seen no evidence that countries with sound and conservative financial systems grow faster than countries with looser and riskier financial systems (although they do seem to have fewer financial crises). In fact I have more than once made reference to Belgian bank historian Raymond de Roover’s provocative and profound comment that “perhaps one could say that reckless banking, while causing many losses to creditors, speeded up the economic development of the United States, while sound banking may have retarded the economic development of Canada.”  Canada was blessed (or cursed, according to de Roover) in the 19^thCentury with being part of the Britain, and so inheriting England’s much better managed financial system.
“Reckless” banking is hard to define, and certainly it is easy to make the case the Chinese banking has been reckless, especially in recent years, but it is a very different type of recklessness. Once again I cannot say with complete confidence how China’s version of its development model differs meaningfully with the American System on the subject of banking, but I would suggest there are at least two very important differences.
First, the American financial system then (and now) has been very good at providing money to risky new ventures. It provides capital on the basis not only of asset value but, more importantly, on future growth expectations, and risk-taking has been actively rewarded In China it isn’t clear that this is the case at all. Chinese banks favor large, well-connected, and often inefficient giants at the expense of risk-takers.
Second, although both systems were prone to bad lending, the American banking system tended to correct very quickly – in the form of a crisis – and bad loans were written down and liquidated almost immediately. This was certainly painful in the sort term – especially if you were a depositor in the affected bank – but by writing down loans and liquidating assets three important objectives were achieved. Financial distress costs were quickly eliminated (writing down debt does that in ways I won’t get into because they are well-known and much discussed in corporate finance theory), capital allocation was driven by profitability, not by implicit guarantees, and assets were returned to economic usefulness quickly.
A classic example of the last of these objectives may be the response to the railway bubble of the 1860s. During and after the 1873 crisis, a number of railroads went bankrupt, including major lines like the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific, the latter of which even brought down Jay Cooke & Company, the leading financier of the US government during the Civil War. After the crisis some major railway bonds traded as low as 15-20% of their original face value, and so they were purchased and reorganized at huge discounts. The new buyers were consequently able to cut freight and passenger costs dramatically, in some cases by over 50%, while still earning more than enough to cover the costs of buying the railroads, and this led to a collapse in transportation costs in the US.
Liquidation, in other words, provides an important economic value to the economy. It allows assets to be re-priced, which creates a boost to the economy and prevents those assets from acting as a deadweight loss. If the railroads hadn’t been liquidated, in other words, any reduction in costs was likely to be minimal and the railroads would have been far less useful to the development of the US economy.
Comparing development models
This issue of the newsletter is long, and I plan to write about this a lot more in the future, but for now I think it makes sense to summarize some of the important points about the American System and other similar growth models, like the Chinese version.

1.      Infant industry protection has worked to promote long-term development under certain conditions and has not worked under other conditions. I would argue that the key difference is that in the former case there were powerful forces that drove managerial and technological innovation and rapid growth in efficiency. 

In the US case this seems to have been brutal domestic competition. If China wants to benefit from its own protection of infant industry, it is important that there be similar domestic drivers of innovation and efficiency. Note that access to cheap capital cannot be such a driver, even though it is one of the main sources of Chinese competitiveness. Access to cheap capital is just another way to protect infant industries from foreign competition. 

2.      Every country that has become sustainably rich has had significant government investment in infrastructure, but not every country that has had significant government investment in infrastructure has become sustainably rich.On the contrary there are many cases of countries with extraordinarily high levels of infrastructure investment that have grown for a period and then faltered. 

I would argue that the difference is almost certainly the extent of capital misallocation. In some countries it has been much easier for policymakers to drive capital expenditures, and in those countries it seems to have been relatively easy to waste investment. If this is the case in China, as I believe it is, the key issue for China is to rein in its spending and develop an alternative and better way to allocate capital. 

The point is that there is a natural limit to infrastructure spending, and this limit is often imposed by institutional distortions in the market economy. When this natural limit is reached, more investment in infrastructure can be wealth destroying, not wealth enhancing, in which case it is far better to cut back on investment and to focus on reducing the institutional constraints to more productive use of capital, such as weak corporate governance and a weak legal framework. The pace of infrastructure investment cannot exceed the pace of institutional reform for very long without itself becoming a problem. 

3.      Any economy looking to achieve sustainable long-term growth must have a “good” financial system that allocates capital efficiently and rewards the correct level of risk-taking. It is hard to determine what the characteristics of a “good” financial system are, but we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that this has to do with stability.

What’s more, while obviously the capital allocation process is vitally important, I would also suggest that the liquidation of bad loans is just as important. Bad loans, as Japan showed us in the past two decades, can become a serious impediment to growth in part because financial distress distorts management incentives in the way widely understood and described in corporate finance theory and in part because they retard the process by which bad investment is absorbed by the economy.

4.      One thing I have not discussed above is the role of wages. The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets. A main focus of the American System, however, was to explain what policies the United States, with its much higher wages than in Europe at the time, had to engineer to generate rapid growth Sustaining high wages, in fact, became one of the key aspects of the American System.

The Japanese version of this development model, as well as many of the various versions implemented in other countries throughout the 20th Century, shared its view of wages not with the American System but rather with classic British economic theory. Rather than take steps to force up wages and keep them high – thereby both driving productivity growth and creating a large domestic consumption market for American producers – many of the later versions of the American System sought to repress growth in household income relative to total production as a way of improving international competitiveness. This is perhaps the main reason why the United Sates, unlike many other countries that have implemented similar development strategies in the 20th Century, tended to run large current account deficits for much of the 19^th Century

This different focus on whether high wages are to be encouraged or discouraged is, I believe – although very little discussed in the theoretical literature as far as I know – nonetheless perhaps the most important difference between the American development model and its many descendants in the 20th and 21st centuries. I would even argue, although I cannot prove it, that one consequence of this difference is that growth in demand tends to be more sustainable when it is balanced between growth in both consumption and investment.

In analyzing China’s growth in the past three decades we seem to forget that there have been many growth “miracles” in the past two hundred years. Some have been sustainable and have led to developed country status but many, if not most, were ultimately unsustainable. Nearly all of the various versions have had some similar characteristics – most obviously infant industry protection, state-led investment in infrastructure, and a financial system that disproportionately favored producers at the expense of savers – but the way these characteristics played out were very different, in large part because the institutional structure of the economy and the financial sector created a very different set of incentives.

I would argue that in understanding China’s growth and its sustainability we need to have a clear understanding of why these characteristics worked in some cases and not in others. Most economists who focus on China seem to know little about economic history, and when they do, their knowledge tends to be limited to a very superficial understanding of US economic history. But there are many precedents for what is happening in China and not all suggest that further Chinese growth is inevitable.

On the contrary, the historical precedents should worry us. In most cases they suggest that China has a very difficult adjustment ahead of it and the closest parallels to its decades of miracle growth suggest unfavorable outcomes. Understanding why the growth model has succeeded in some few cases and failed in most will help us enormously in understanding China’s prospects.

This is an abbreviated version of the newsletter that went out last week.  Academics, journalists, and government and NGO officials who want to subscribe to the newsletter should write to me at chinfinpettis@yahoo.com, stating your affiliation, please.  Investors who want to buy a subscription should write to me, also at that address.

What Bill Gates Got Wrong About Why Nations Fail

Our recent book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, received the harshest reviews from those who see geography and culture as the root causes of poverty, and enlightened leaders -- or even more enlightened outside donors and organizations -- as the keys to economic development. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his dedication to international aid, billionaire foundation chief Bill Gates falls into this category: His Feb. 26 review of our book was particularly uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, it was also dead wrong on many counts. COMMENTS (0) SHARE: Share on twitter Twitter Share on reddit Reddit inShare15 Bookmark and Share More... Gates's review is disappointing, but not just because he disagrees with us. As academics, we expect that. Research is all about arguing and contradicting, finding new pieces of evidence, developing new concepts and perspectives, and getting closer to the truth. Alas, Gates fails in this endeavor. His inability to understand even the most rudimentary parts of our thesis means that his review fails to invite constructive argument. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to respond because of the undue attention the review has generated. To start with, Gates makes some pretty baffling statements about our book, such as his assertion that "important terms aren't really defined." Actually, all of the major concepts we use in the book are defined; one just needs to read the book. Other assertions demonstrate not only that Gates is unfamiliar with the academic literature, which is understandable, but that he actually did not bother to consult the bibliographic essay and the references at the end. He writes, "The authors ... attribute the decline of Venice to a reduction in the inclusiveness of its institutions. The fact is, Venice declined because competition came along ... Even if Venice had managed to preserve the inclusiveness of their institutions, it would not have made up for their loss of the spice trade." This is just bad history. Venice didn't decline because of the loss of the spice trade. If that were the case, the decline should have started at the very end of the 15th century. But the decline was already well underway by the middle of the 14th century. More generally, research by Diego Puga and Daniel Trefler shows that Venice's fortunes had nothing to do with competition or the spice trade. Likewise, Gates seems to think that the Maya declined because of the "weather." Though there is certainly scholarly dispute over why Maya civilization decayed, to our knowledge no reputable scholar argues that it was due to the weather. Instead, most scholars emphasize the role of inter-city warfare and the collapse of Mayan political institutions. Nor does the book, as Gates would have it, "overlook the incredible period of growth and innovation in China between 800 and 1400." We discuss that period, and explain why it didn't translate into sustained economic growth (see Chapter 8, in particular, pp. 231-234). Gates also says at one point that our book "refers to me in a positive light." Sorry, we do no such thing. We point out that Gates, just like Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, would have loved to form a monopoly. He tried and failed. What our book shows in a positive light are the U.S. institutions, such the Department of Justice, that stopped Gates and Microsoft from cornering the market. We say, "sadly there are few heroes in this book." Bill Gates was not one of them. On a related note, Gates writes that that our book is "quite unfair to Slim." Mexico, he contends, is "much better off with Slim's contribution in running businesses well than it would be without him." But once again, this reveals a lack of understanding of our main thesis, which isn't that Carlos Slim is evil and the root cause of Mexico's problems. We argue that ambitious entrepreneurs like Gates or Slim will do good for society if inclusive institutions constrain them, and that they will mostly serve their own interests otherwise. So the right counterfactual to Slim isn't no Slim, but a Mexico in which people like Slim (and hundreds of other talented would-be entrepreneurs who never got the opportunity to flourish because of the country's poor education system or because of its terrible competition laws) operate within the context of inclusive economic institutions and therefore enrich their society to a much greater extent. For the record, however, before cheerleading Slim, Gates might want to read the OECD's 2012 report on telecommunications policy and regulation in Mexico, which estimates the social costs of Slim's monopoly at U.S. $129 billion and counting. (The latest Forbes list of the world's richest people puts Slim's net worth at U.S. $79 billion). So in what way is Mexico better off exactly? Gates also complains in his review that we "ridicule modernization theory." We don't. We try to articulate an alternative theory of extractive growth -- which takes place under extractive, authoritarian political institutions -- where countries grow because their leadership controlling these extractive institutions feels secure and able to control and benefit from the growth process. This occupies a large part of our book because it is a central feature of economic and political development over the last several thousand years. Our theory suggests why extractive growth doesn't automatically lead to more inclusive institutions: Growth is made possible, at least in most cases, by the leaders and dominant elites' belief in their relative security. Gates is right that there are examples like South Korea (which we discussed in the book) that have transitioned to more inclusive institutions following a period of extractive growth. But South Korea's transition to democracy in the 1980s was in no way automatic. It came about as a result of protests by students and workers against the military regime, and only after the repression by the military failed to quell the unrest. More importantly, as a cursory look at our bibliographic essay would have shown, our dismissal of modernization theory isn't based on a few case studies or a gut feeling, but on careful econometric evidence. See, for example, our papers titled "Income and Democracy" and "Re-evaluating the Modernization Hypothesis, both jointly authored with Simon Johnson and Pierre Yared. At another point in his review, Gates contends that economic growth is "strongly correlated with embracing capitalistic economics." Yet it is far from clear what he means by "capitalistic economics." Were Egypt's economic institutions during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak -- after he liberalized the economy and reduced the role of the state -- capitalistic? Most people refer to this as "crony capitalism," but perhaps this is all part of capitalist economics? Or consider the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico in the 19th century, which eradicated many of the remaining restrictions of the Spanish colonial system, established an economy based on private enterprise (especially of his cronies), and "freed" markets (including the creation of the market for coerced labor). Was that capitalistic? What about South Africa under apartheid, based on private enterprise by whites, but disempowering and exploiting the majority blacks? Perhaps Gates himself should have more carefully defined his terms. The concept of capitalism doesn't feature in our book for good reason. It muddies the waters. Our point, by which we stand strongly, is that what distinguishes societies isn't whether they are centrally planned or capitalist, but whether they are extractive or inclusive. Though centrally planned economies are by their nature extractive, so are many "capitalist" economies. Finally, Gates takes issue with our supposedly "huge attack on foreign aid," citing in particular our "misleading" claims about Afghanistan. But again, he would have benefited from looking at the bibliography. The finding that about 10 percent of foreign aid goes to intended recipients isn't from Afghanistan, as he seems to think, but from Uganda, which was not a war zone but a peaceful country at the time of the 2004 study we cite. More importantly, there is now considerable evidence showing that foreign aid in the postwar era has had little positive impact on economic development, which Gates chooses to ignore (see, for example, William Easterly's White Man's Burden). Denying this is really putting your head in the sand. But even sadder is the fact that we don't even argue against foreign aid. What we argue in the book is that aid -- the little of it that reaches its target -- does a lot of good for poor people. But it is not the solution to the real problems of development. Instead of endlessly asserting empirically untenable positions, we all need to move on and find more constructive ways to engage with poor countries. Foreign aid should certainly be part -- but not all -- of this engagement. Gates does correctly point out that much is missing from the framework in our book. Even if underdevelopment isn't just a problem of bad leadership, and even if its solution won't come from enlightened leaders, a more complete framework should indeed integrate the behavior of leaders that play an important role in state building, organizing collective action, and articulating visions for social change. Examples of such leaders include Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, both of whom undoubtedly influenced the course of their country's development. But we chose to emphasize institutions in our book because for leadership to have a lasting impact, it must become institutionalized via inclusive political institutions. After several decades of promoting education and developing a Tunisian national identity, for example, Bourguiba, who ran Tunisia as a dictator, was elbowed out of power by a very different sort of strongman, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was far more interested in using his power to loot the country's resources. But Gates doesn't seem to be interested in such subtleties, preferring instead to criticize every aspect of Why Nations Fail. Some say that all publicity is good publicity, and we should be thrilled to have Bill Gates review our book. Publicity is nice. But we spent more than 15 years researching, writing, and thinking about these topics, and we would be thrilled if the reviewers actually read and understood the book in the first place. Then we could have a constructive debate about the root causes of poverty in the world.

Using your sales force to jump-start growth

There’s no escaping the impact of the sales force on your company’s growth trajectory. This is the frontline group best placed to gain an intimate understanding of existing customers, to observe the forces at work in an industry, and to identify potential new business. During the past year, we interviewed about 100 sales executives around the world, across a range of industries, to identify the critical elements that distinguish true sales leaders from also-rans. This article highlights four intriguing ideas the executives described for leveraging the sales force to jump-start growth. Together, these suggestions offer practical insights for sales groups, as well as a starting point for discussions among CEOs and other senior managers hoping to get more from sales and marketing investments.

Look over the horizon

The sudden arrival of a truly disruptive technology—one that upends markets in ways few anticipate—presents obvious challenges to industry incumbents. Yet it’s also a huge growth opportunity. One supplier of parts to high-tech manufacturers has created a team of “speculative market analysts” to better identify the emergence of disruptive technologies and to predict their business implications. The team helps the company to position itself as a supplier that’s ahead of the curve and to enjoy superior sales growth while competitors scramble to catch up.
The full-time team cuts across all business units and draws on a variety of internal and external sources: the sales force provides insights into the technology initiatives of the company’s customers while continually pressing them for feedback about its shortcomings and the efforts of competitors. In addition, the team closely scrutinizes all reports from competitors and customers—easier said than done, given the sheer volume of market information emanating from countries such as China. It even fosters close ties with venture capital firms and provides up-and-coming companies with funding and “sweat equity” to convert innovative concepts into realities. Together, these efforts have helped the company’s sales force to get ahead of recent major disruptive trends, including the boom in tablet devices and e-readers, as well as the growing fields of LED lighting and solar technology. What’s more, the team’s efforts are generating an estimated annual return on investment that exceeds 12 percent.

Hunt and farm

It’s easy for organizations to fall into the habit of seeking sales growth only through existing customers. Even though the sales force is typically best placed to find and approach potential clients, individual reps may shun the uncomfortable task of cold-calling in favor of selling to customers they know well. Yet there’s only so much each customer can buy, so finding new business is critical for growth.
One large distributor of auto parts tried tackling this problem by separating these activities. Its sales leader designated some reps as “hunters,” who focused exclusively on finding new prospects, while “farmer” reps concentrated on existing customers. The model succeeded initially but later foundered as hunters became discouraged by the time and effort required for their relatively scant wins, as well as the perception that they were second-class citizens compared with farmers.
As attrition rates among hunter reps grew, the sales leader changed tack. To demonstrate the importance of finding new customers, he designated one day a month as a “hunting day,” when all reps would exclusively chase new prospects. The rest of the time, they could focus largely on existing customers. The result was astounding: in a single day, the company signed up as many new customers as it normally did in two months. Setting aside one day a month for hunting new business is now an ingrained part of the company’s sales practices.

Motivate with more than money

The basic remuneration model for sales reps is simple: a base salary offers security; commissions and bonuses provide incentives to perform. Most companies work endlessly to optimize the balance. Yet what if money isn’t the thing that actually matters most? One financial-services company tried all manner of compensation plans before determining that while carrots and sticks did influence the sales performance of its financial advisers and sales managers, the results were short-lived.
As the company explored alternatives, its sales leader observed something important: the most successful advisers often spoke passionately about the sense of fulfillment that came from helping clients realize their dreams. Fundamentally, that was why these men and women had become financial advisers. The realization that money was just one of the factors driving performance prompted the sales leader to work with managers and individual advisers to develop specific goals that would help the advisers feel they had genuinely helped customers. Maybe it was prioritizing quality over quantity by working more intensely with fewer clients. Perhaps advisers needed a wider range of financial products to ensure that they had all possible options to meet their clients’ investment goals. At the same time, the company identified and laid out steps for overcoming potential bottlenecks, such as a lack of coaching, training, financial-management tools, or appropriate products.
The company knows that money remains critical to its sales team but now recognizes the benefits of identifying other, deeper motivations. The attrition rate among financial advisers has fallen sharply, and they not only have become more successful at winning business but also have found that clients are entrusting more of their wealth with the company. These goals have been met with no increase in the compensation of advisers.

Boost sales without slashing prices

Companies experiencing flat or declining sales often elect to cut prices to spur demand. Yet sometimes, averages lie: a decline across a market doesn’t mean that all market segments are weakening. A North American logistics company learned this lesson the hard way when it empowered sales reps to lower prices to meet management’s goal of boosting volumes. Because the price guidelines were set without taking into account the competitive dynamics of each specific market segment, only some reps recouped the cost of the price cuts with higher volumes. The company’s overall competitive position deteriorated.
Top management decided to recalibrate its approach. The characteristics of each of the company’s various market segments varied wildly. Some were growing fast in the wake of continuing property construction, population influxes, and investment; others were flat-lining. The sales reps got new price and volume targets based on each segment’s characteristics. These targets incorporated metrics such as the economic growth rate in geographies where particular industries were heavy users of the company’s services, the strength of the company’s operational assets relative to those of its competitors, and whether the company was losing or gaining customers at accelerating or decelerating rates.
This granular view of each sales territory led to new sales approaches. In higher-growth markets with limited competition, sales reps aggressively sought new business and raised prices where possible. In declining markets with stiffer competition, reps were authorized to cut prices to prevent customers from defecting. This market-by-market roadmap allowed the company not only to reverse several years of declining market share but also to secure an overall average price increase of 3 percent.

McKinsey on Finance on iPad
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Sales_Distribution/Using_your_sales_force_to_jump-start_growth_2781

Behind Firm's Default: Vietnam's Growth Mania

HANOI—State-owned shipbuilder Vinashin's default on a $600 million loan late last week is just the latest crisis challenging Communist-run Vietnam's ability to get its economy under control after years of pell-mell growth and spiraling inflation.
The company, officially named Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Group, failed to make a $60 million initial repayment on the syndicated loan to international lenders, saying it will make only interest payments, says a person familiar with the matter. The company has agreed to meet with creditors in mid-January to discuss repaying the loan, although some lenders privately have said they are uncertain whether Vinashin has sufficient resources to do so.
In defaulting on the debt, Vinashin has added to a catalog of problems afflicting Vietnam, once one of the world's hottest emerging markets.
Over the past decade, the country's economy has expanded from crater-pocked rice paddies to erect gleaming new factories and towering skyscrapers, prompting development economists to extol the country as a model for other frontier markets. On the narrow streets of Hanoi, Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars now compete for space with rickshaws and motor-scooters.
In the past few weeks, the cost of Vietnam's poorly policed transformation has become alarmingly clear, offering food for thought for investors seeking rising returns elsewhere on the frontier-markets map. Economists say the country's worsening problems, and the impact they could have on its dwindling currency, might also worry textile and agricultural producers in countries like Thailand and Indonesia which compete with Vietnam in those sectors.
Inflation is soaring, reaching 11.75% year-to-year in December, while Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings have all downgraded Vietnam's credit ratings because of its relentless focus on pumping up growth in the past six months. The government, meanwhile, appears set to continue its rolling devaluations of Vietnam's dong currency while ordinary people scramble to stock up on U.S. dollars or gold. Since mid-2008, the dong has lost around a fifth of its value as Vietnam floods the banking system with money.
Vinashin's escalating debt problems are a fresh flash point, threatening to further raise the government's borrowing costs overseas just when it hopes to raise funds to improve the economy's creaking infrastructure.
Vinashin borrowed aggressively with the encouragement of the government in the hope of becoming a global player in the shipbuilding industry. It was part of a government-directed plan to keep large chunks of the Vietnamese economy under state control. But this summer Vinashin nearly collapsed with $4.4 billion in debts, leading to the arrest of top executives for allegedly mismanaging the firm, one of Vietnam's biggest employers. The outcry was sufficient to prompt Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to acknowledge his own mistakes in failing to properly supervise Vinashin, which internal government documents describe as "out of control."
Some analysts see Vinashin's default as potentially a make-or-break moment for Vietnam. By choosing not to bail out the company, says Kevin Grice, an economist with London-based Capital Economics, Vietnam's government is sending a message to other large state-owned enterprises to put their own houses in order and to root out the inefficiency that plagues the state sector here.
"By not standing unilaterally behind Vinashin, the government is reducing the issue of moral hazard in Vietnam and it is also ensuring that investors will become more selective," he says.
But he and other analysts caution it will work only if Hanoi toughens the way it supervises the state sector, which constitutes about a third of the economy and diverts resources from more efficient private firms. Vietnam also needs to move quickly to curb inflation and wean itself off its long-standing emphasis on promoting rapid growth whatever the cost. "The longer they delay reform, the worse it will be when the markets force them to do it, but old habits die hard," Mr. Grice says.
Prospects for a wholesale shake-up seem dim. Ju Wang, a credit-markets strategist with UBS AG in Singapore, says reducing the moral hazard might be on the government's mind, but so too might be Vietnam's paltry foreign reserves. The $14 billion the International Monetary Fund reported Vietnam as having at the end of September is "barely enough to cover short-term debt of around $6 billion to $7 billion and a wide trade deficit of $12 billion" that the government projects for this year, the strategist says.
Vietnam has a chance to change course and adopt a more prudent growth trajectory at the Communist Party's Congress which begins Jan. 11. The meeting will select a new party chief and also recommend a new president of the country's rubber-stamp legislature while determining whether the key figure, the premier, Mr. Dung, keeps his job for a second, five-year term. The meeting will also set the country's economic-policy direction for the next five years.The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are urging the country's leadership to put the brakes on rapid economic growth and focus instead on curbing inflation and buttressing the dong, which has also been taking a beating in recent weeks with the black-market rate for dollars sometimes reaching 21,500 dong compared with Friday's official rate of 18,498 dong—a premium of around 15%.
But people familiar with the party's policy discussions, say the country's top rulers are unwilling to make a break from their high-growth policies. "The changes at the top—if there are any—won't mean a thing if the policies remain the same," says a person with knowledge of the deliberations.Some outsiders, meanwhile, say they are fascinated by the way Vietnam's economic planners have had numerous opportunities to learn from the experiences of other developing economies and avoid their current problems. In Asia during the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, many countries ramped up growth rates and flooded their economies with easy credit only to trigger a financial crisis that swept the region in the late 1990s and forced the restructuring of scores of state-backed conglomerates. Vietnam has taken much the same approach, with the central bank estimating credit will expand 28% this year from 2009, according to the central bank.
"It seems that countries have to learn from their own mistakes, not those of others," Capital Economics' Mr. Grice says.
Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy and a veteran Vietnam observer, says he expects very little substantive change to emerge from the congress and perhaps even less debate. A crackdown on dissidents and bloggers in the lead-up to the event, which is held every five years, has stifled the atmosphere in what is already one of the world's most repressive countries, he says.
"The best intellectual talent in this country is pulling out its hair at the moment," says Mr. Thayer, who says there was greater momentum toward reform at the previous congress in 2006. "People were openly asking the party for change then. None of that's happening now," he says. Economists say part of the problem is that the party promotes officials based on their ability to hit growth targets, fill quotas and complete five-year plans. Often they hit these targets with little regard for the inflationary consequences or the spread of corruption that many analysts say is endemic here.
"Growth is the only thing the party understands, so that's what everybody chases," says a government official who asked to remain anonymous. "Nothing will change until a new generation of leaders comes in, and that's not going to happen yet."There are some Vietnamese analysts who think the government is heading in the right direction. Independent analyst Kien Thanh Bui worries that tightening monetary policy as the IMF suggests could stall growth in the private sector while doing little to arrest the problems in the state-owned enterprises. He reckons cracking down on corruption would do more to help relieve inflation because graft pushes up costs at every stage of the supply chain in Vietnam.
Other Vietnamese analysts are more pessimistic, especially as the government has only nudged up its benchmark interest rate, to 9% from 8%, since November 2009, despite a rapid uptick in inflation.
"The government people are talking about targeting inflation to some extent, but their target is 7%, which is the same target they had for this year," says Nguyen Quang A, who headed Vietnam's only independent think tank before its founders closed it under pressure from the Communist Party. "The pro-growth fixation here is a kind of mania," he says. "Vietnam is dancing on a razor blade."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203568004576043180815719282.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fxml%2Frss%2F3_7011+%28WSJ.com%3A+What%27s+News+US%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Inflation Threatens China's Growth

China is seeing the highest price increases in over two years, and this has officials worried. While the official consumer inflation rate was 4.4% for October, a 10% rise in food prices is having a huge impact on poorer households. The domestic media is filled with stories of hoarding by both producers and consumers.

The government has responded with a small interest-rate increase and some hikes of the reserve requirement, though rates on demand deposits have not budged at all. More action is needed. A resolute drive to slow growth of the money supply will stop the hemorrhaging of household savings due to inflation. As an added bonus, it may also wean China off of its heavy dependence on investment-driven growth.

The recent bout of inflation may seem mild in comparison to the double-digit price rises in the 1980s and '90s. But the social impact may be almost as severe. According to research by a Chinese government think tank, poorer households now face inflation that is twice the overall rate because their consumption basket is dominated by food items, which have seen the most rapid price increases. So even though wage gains seem robust, many households are seeing flat or negative increases in purchasing power.

Household savings have also been eroded by government policies to control deposit interest rates. After the recent 0.25-percentage point lending-rate hike, the rate paid on demand deposits did not budge. Even without inflation, depositors are paid artificially low rates because the government prevents banks from setting their own deposit rates. In times of inflation, households, especially poorer ones with money mainly in demand deposits, suffer negative returns on their savings.

Savings in demand-deposit accounts today yield negative returns after adjusting for inflation, for a real return of about -4%. Even net of inflation, deposits in a one-year time deposit earn -2%. Meanwhile, banks are earning large margins, and borrowers of medium- to long-term corporate loans, which tend to be state-owned or state-dominated firms, are borrowing at an inflation-adjusted rate of about 2%. Given that households currently have more than 11 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion) in demand deposits, an annual inflation rate of 4% this year would in effect see the transfer of over 400 billion yuan ($60 billion) from these households to banks and corporate borrowers, both dominated by the state.

This erosion of poor households' purchasing power goes directly against the goal of "raising the income of medium and low income urban and rural residents," as outlined by the Party plenum last month. Given that nominal wages for a large number of households remain relatively flat, continual inflation alone will drive many into destitution. The pressure from negative earnings on savings has driven richer households to speculate in the real estate and stock markets. Rising inflation has further incentivized all households to begin stockpiling food and commodities such as gold. Food hoarding, if sufficiently widespread, can further increase inflationary pressure.

Although inflation might have been boosted by some recent supply shocks, the rapid expansion of the money supply in recent years, especially the spectacular explosion of lending last year, is the root cause. Thus, a key ingredient of future inflation fighting will be to slow down substantially the expansion of money supply.

In the past, the Chinese government has successfully stifled inflationary pressure via the imposition of a resolute credit ceiling on banks. Today, regulators would also need to monitor closely the expansion of trust products and the inflow of hot money. The People's Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission have all the tools necessary to fight inflation. A combination of interest rate hikes, a credit ceiling, a freeze in trust product issuance and aggressive sterilization of foreign exchange inflows can halt inflationary expectations and stop the erosion of household savings. China's top leadership, however, needs to make clear its collective determination to fight inflation in order to give these measures credibility.

To be sure, the sudden slowdown in credit expansion will cause illiquidity in some investment projects and slowed real-estate construction. Nonperforming loan ratios may rise as cash-starved projects become unable to meet interest payments.

In the medium term, however, the policy will pay benefits. Macroeconomic retrenchment credibly commits the government to both low inflation and a less investment-intensive growth path by cutting off liquidity from a large number of projects. Local authorities will learn that they can no longer pursue growth based mainly on adding new investment projects financed by bank loans and bond issuance.

In the mid- to late-1990s, cash-starved local authorities became much more open to privatization, allowing private firms to dominate sectors previously monopolized by state-owned firms. The competition that resulted was good for the economy. Repeating that process will not be painless, but past experience has shown that resolute macroeconomic retrenchment can put China on a healthier path for growth.

Mr. Shih is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of "Factions and Finance in China" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). A related editorial appears today.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB30001424052748704393604575615720549028004.html?mod=djkeyword

The Risk to Vietnamese Growth

Vietnam has been an occasional darling of international investors, and right now the on-again-off-again romance appears to be back on again. Sustaining that will be another matter, however. All is not well, as the country experiences an expanding credit bubble and suffers mounting inflation. This raises the danger that Hanoi could retreat from market reforms at the National Congress of the Communist Party set for January.
The "story" for international investors consists of high growth rates coupled with an entrepreneurial population. Foreign investment has flowed to utilities, manufacturing and real estate in the hopes of serving Vietnam's growing middle class. Foreign direct investment this year is $12.2 billion as the country slowly brings back investors it lost during the global financial crisis.
This growth story comes with caveats, however. The most obvious is inflation. Current estimates peg this year's price increase at nearly 9% year-over-year, after Vietnamese consumers recovered from inflation as high 27% in late 2008. The two largest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, have seen prices increase by 1% for the month of September alone.
The fundamental problem is that Hanoi has tried to use ultra-cheap bank credit to fuel growth, a strategy that has sparked inflation. The State Bank of Vietnam has kept real interest rates in negative territory by setting the refinancing rate at 8% and discount rate at 6%. Meanwhile, new credit amounted to 37% of GDP in 2007, 20% in 2008 and 35% last year. The government aims to expand credit by another 25% of GDP this year in an effort to fuel growth.
Liberalization has not been rapid enough to create profitable new uses for that cash. Instead, much of the money goes to large, inefficient state-owned enterprises. Small business owners have long complained about being unable to procure loans from Vietnamese commercial banks. Banks have instead been extending large amounts of credit to the likes of Vinashin, the near-bankrupt ship-building conglomerate and one of Vietnam's largest state-owned enterprises. The company carries an estimated $4.7 billion in debt and is the single largest debtor for many Vietnamese banks.

One consequence of this credit-expansion policy is that since all the new money is not funding productive investments, it is generating rapid inflation instead. Another result is that banks have left themselves exposed to huge write-downs once Vinashin's total bill comes due. When Fitch downgraded Vietnam's credit rating from BB- to B+ in July, it noted that if Vietnam's banks used international accounting standards, nonperforming loans would be three to five times higher than what is reported under Vietnam's standards. The Government Inspection Office last week discovered that five commercial banks had violated procedures by granting short-term loans they should not have.
To make matters worse, there is also the lurking danger of a balance of payments crisis. Last month, the International Monetary Fund reported that Vietnam's foreign currency reserves for the first half of the year had fallen to only seven weeks worth of imports, below the three-month guideline recommended to avert a balance of payments crisis.
Large amounts of foreign currency from international trade and overseas remittances do flow into Vietnam's economy, but a large, unknown amount does not end up in the banking system. Vietnamese business owners who survived through times of war, famine and hyperinflation have become accustomed to holding onto dollars and gold rather than the volatile dong. It is unlikely that sentiment on the dong will pick up enough to shift behavior away from hoarding dollars to selling dollars to banks.
The central bank is not blind to all these dangers. State Bank of Vietnam Governor Nguyen Van Giau has tried to rein in inflation by tightening monetary policy. This month he raised the required capital-adequacy ratio to 9% from 8% in an attempt to force banks to hold more cash on their balance sheets instead of lending.
But here politics comes into play, and particularly the jostling for position ahead of January's Congress. The politically connected managers who run Vietnam's large state-owned enterprises hold considerable sway in the upcoming Congress, so ambitious party officials ignore demands for cheap credit at their own peril. As a result, no sooner had Mr. Giau raised the capital ratio than other government officials pressed the central bank to further lower lending rates, effectively negating the tightening. Mr. Giau will likely not have a free hand to tame inflation until after January.
Instead, it is starting to look like party officials increasingly attribute all these worries not to their own economic mismanagement and failure to implement deeper reforms, but to the reforms they have already made. One sign is that the government has resorted to old-style price controls rather than market-based mechanisms like interest-rate adjustments to try to bring inflation under control.
That is the worst possible outcome. Vietnam needs more market-oriented reform, not less, to create productive outlets for longer-term capital investment. That includes giving banks greater scope to lend to small, entrepreneurial companies. It also means avoiding measures like price controls that deter long-term foreign investors while encouraging short-term speculators who bet mainly on policy moves rather than long-term growth.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung had been considered a market reformer, but it is becoming clear that command-and-control habits die hard. Investors will watch January's Congress closely to see whether Hanoi still understands that liberalization is the path to growth, or whether Vietnam retreats back to its old ways.
Mr. Phan is an economic research analyst in New York.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304741404575565160572033020.html?mod=djkeyword#articleTabs%3Darticle 

Riding Asia’s digital tiger

Asia is the world’s hottest area of Internet growth, but the dynamics on the ground vary widely by nation.

Asia’s emerging markets are poised for explosive digital growth. The region’s two largest economies—China and India—already boast some 500 million Internet users, and we forecast nearly 700 million more will be added by 2015 (Exhibit 1). Other emerging Asian nations have the potential to grow at a similarly torrid pace. We estimate that within five years, this billion-plus user market may generate revenues of more than $80 billion in Internet commerce, access fees, device sales, and so forth (Exhibit 2).
To better understand the consumers, growth prospects, and problems, we surveyed more than 13,000 individuals across China, India, and Malaysia—countries at very different stages of their digital evolution.¹ The key finding? While there were some notable differences in the types of content consumers favor and the devices they use, significant demand is waiting to be unlocked in all three nations. That could lead to growing markets for digital content and services and to new opportunities around digital marketing, including efforts to reach consumers via Internet sales channels.

Malaysia

Of the three markets we researched, Malaysia is the most advanced. While the country has only around 15 million–plus Internet users, that’s close to 55 percent of the total population, and mobile Internet penetration is close to 30 percent of it. Given the Malaysian government’s push to expand high-speed broadband, we forecast that the country will have up to 25 million Internet users by 2015, or close to 80 percent of the population. As both fixed and wireless broadband grow, we project that more than 50 percent of all users will choose to have both personal-computer and mobile-device options for getting online.
Malaysians consume 35 percent more digital media than Internet users in China and 150 percent more than users in India, particularly on social-networking sites and instant messaging. That may, for example, give handset manufacturers opportunities to build social-network access into their devices. We also found that Malaysians like to multitask across both digital and traditional media. For advertisers, that’s problematic, since viewers are paying less attention to traditional media content—and thus advertising.

China

China leads the world in sheer numbers of Internet users—more than 420 million people, or close to 30 percent of the population. Over 80 percent surf the Web from home, while 230 million use mobile devices. We forecast that the number of Internet users will almost double over the next five years, hitting 770 million people, or 55 percent of the population. More than 70 percent will use both PCs and handheld devices.
China’s digital usage, which is similar to that of the United States, skews toward instant messaging, social networks, gaming, and streaming video. Increasingly, Internet users in China are substituting digital media for traditional ones, with the potential for further cannibalization as digital consumption grows. This development has stark implications for advertisers and how they allocate future marketing budgets. Consumers, meanwhile, also use the Internet in their purchasing decisions. They are more influenced by recommendations from social-network contacts and friends than by traditional marketing messages or visits to company Web sites.

India

With only 7 percent of the population connected (81 million users), India is Asia’s digital sleeper. Yet we believe that it’s poised to become a truly mobile-Internet society as new users leapfrog PCs altogether. We project that by 2015, the number of Internet users will increase almost fivefold, to more than 350 million—28 percent of the population—with more than half of those accessing the Web via mobile phones. To capture this opportunity, companies will need to roll out wired and wireless broadband networks aggressively, to make smartphones and network access more affordable, and to develop new content types.
Consumer demand clearly is robust. On average, Indians spend more than four hours a day consuming online and offline content. On PCs, often used in cyber cafés, Indians spend much time e-mailing and are heavy consumers of downloaded videos and music, as well as DVD movies. While Indian consumers use mobile phones predominantly for voice services, they also treat them as offline personal-entertainment devices, listening to radio stations or to downloaded music. There is significant pent-up demand for more convenient and personalized Internet access—a void the mobile Web could fill.

Embracing the opportunity

High hardware costs, inconsistent network quality, and limited access could check these optimistic growth prospects. But the extent of such barriers varies by nation, and there’s notable progress overcoming them. Construction of network infrastructure is proceeding apace—companies in India, for example, just spent nearly $25 billion on telecommunications spectrum. Meanwhile, hardware and access costs are declining in most markets. The biggest challenge is to make money while creating a variety of low-cost content. Three issues are especially important:

• Innovators and entrepreneurs must develop content creation and delivery models priced low enough to compete against the pirated options currently available.
• Content and Web services providers need to foster the growth of local and regional advertising markets to help defray the cost of content creation.
• E-commerce platforms, including transaction systems that make purchases more convenient and trusted, must be developed.

At the same time, companies in consumer-facing sectors (for instance, automotive, packaged consumer goods, and retailing) will need to reconsider their marketing and advertising strategies in light of the shift away from traditional media. At stake is a significant competitive advantage in a region that already boasts more than half the world’s Internet users—and will only continue to grow.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Talent/Riding_Asias_digital_tiger_2667