信息技術與新型全球化

Every newspaper picture editor knows the score. If it’s a story about trade, it gets illustrated with a photo of a gargantuan cargo ship piled high with containers. And every amateur apostle of the free market, along with a few government ministers, knows that all you need to do to win an argument about trade is to cite the theory of comparative advantage and you’re pretty much done.

任何一位報紙圖片編輯都知道這個套路。如果這是一篇有關貿易的報道，與之搭配的圖片就應該展現一艘巨大的貨輪，船上集裝箱高高堆起。任何一位自由市場的業餘倡導者以及一些政府部門的部長也都知道，要想在有關貿易的爭論中取勝，你只需要引用一下比較優勢理論。

Much public understanding about trade and globalisation is either scant or trapped in models and realities that owe more to the 20th century, and sometimes the 19th, than to today. At a moment when the downsides of trade and globalisation are cited as causes of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of rightwing populism in Europe, getting the analysis right is a matter of rather more than academic interest.

公衆對貿易和全球化的認識要麼匱乏，要麼陷在模型或實例中走不出來，而且這些模型或實例通常更多反映的是二十世紀、有時甚至是十九世紀的情況，而非當下的現實。鑑於貿易和全球化的負面影響在當下被用作解釋英國脫歐、唐納德•特朗普(Donald Trump)當選美國總統以及右翼民粹主義在歐洲興起的原因，進行正確的分析就不僅僅是學術界感興趣的問題了。

Enter, with exemplary timing, this excellent book by Richard Baldwin, an academic with a strong applied focus, who combines a professorship at the Graduate Institute in Geneva with the presidency of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a renowned network of economists.

這本來自理查德•鮑德溫(Richard Baldwin)的傑作對上市時間的把握堪稱典範。鮑德溫是一位高度重視研究現實問題的學者，他是日內瓦國際研究所(Graduate Institute in Geneva)的教授，同時還是經濟政策研究中心(Centre for Economic Policy Research)的主席。後者是一個頗具聲望的經濟學家聯盟。

For its time and as far as it goes, the 19th-century theory of comparative advantage is fine. Countries specialise in what they are relatively good at: high-wage and capital-rich 19th-century Europe did higher-technology industry, poorer countries such as India did agriculture and small-scale manufactures. Thus, given the productivity gains in manufacturing, began the “Great Divergence” that meant the richer countries pulling away from the rest.

就其所產生的年代及其所討論的深度而言，誕生於19世紀的比較優勢理論是很好的。國家應專注於自身相對擅長的領域：例如十九世紀時高工資、資本充裕的歐洲國家就大力發展了技術含量較高的工業，印度等收入較低的國家就主要發展農業和小型製造業。因此，在製造業生產率提升的影響下，“大分裂”(Great Divergence)發生了，而這意味着高收入國家相對於世界其他地區的領先優勢拉大。

But Baldwin’s analysis notes this was only one form of globalisation. His framework posits three “cascading constraints” that hold back the globalisation of markets, namely the costs of moving goods, ideas and people. Initially, all were bundled together: early societies stayed where they were, passed down information to the next generation and ate what they grew. The first wave of globalisation that created the Great Divergence expanded markets via the falling cost of transporting physical goods, thanks to the steamship and the railway.

但鮑德溫的分析指出，這只是全球化的一種表現形式。他的分析框架提出了三種阻礙市場全球化的“逐層遞進限制”，即貨物運輸成本、觀念傳播成本以及人員流動成本。最初這三種成本是混合在一起的：在早期社會形態中，人們幾乎不怎麼離開居住地，把信息傳遞給下一代，吃的也是自己種植生產的食物。導致了“大分裂”的第一波全球化浪潮通過降低實體貨物運輸成本拓展了市場空間，這主要歸功於蒸汽船和鐵路的出現。

But the globalisation that began around 1990 and led to the astonishing rise — in fact, re-emergence — of China and other emerging market giants reflected a relaxation of the constraint on ideas. Digitisation and communications allowed the monitoring and control of supply chains that had previously been bundled together in one economy to be split up into dozens or hundreds of stages, which were then allocated to producers around the globe according to efficiency and cost.

而始於1990年前後、推動了中國和其他主要新興市場經濟體崛起——更準確的說是重新崛起——的那一輪全球化浪潮反映了限制觀念傳播因素的放鬆。數字化以及現代通訊使得監督控制供應鏈的過程可以分散化，將過去集中在一個經濟體境內的生產線分拆爲數十道甚至上百道工序，並根據成本和效率指標分發給世界各地的生產商。

Baldwin describes very well how this changes the simple country-by-country focus of comparative advantage, with some real-world case studies. South Korea, for example, shifted from its original model of operating an entire car industry at home to setting up an international automotive supply chain. With production processes being broken up into individual pieces and tasks, the sophistication goes to finer degrees. Some groups of workers, who can provide the necessary skills for the cheapest rate, prosper; some languish. Manufacturing sectors in rich countries require workers with very different skills, historically more typical of the service sector, such as management and design.

鮑德溫出色刻畫了這一新情況是如何改變各個國家單純側重於本國比較優勢的做法的，並對一些真實案例進行了討論。例如，韓國改變了最初在國內運營一整條汽車生產線的模式，轉而建設國際化的汽車供應鏈。隨着製造流程被打碎成了一個個單一任務，複雜的生產過程進入了一個更加精細的階段。部分工人羣體發展壯大——他們能以最低的工資提供必要的技能；部分羣體逐漸沒落。高收入國家的製造業部門需要工人具備非常不同的技能，例如管理和設計能力，而過去對這些技能的要求常見於服務業。

Just as South Korea has changed, so newly industrialising countries are less keen on setting up entire industries at home and instead try to insert themselves into global supply chains. Sometimes this means changing, not just exploiting, their comparative advantage. Baldwin cites Vietnam, which joined Honda’s supply network by starting to manufacture motorcycle parts using production and technical expertise imported from the parent company. Thus Vietnam’s existing advantage of low-cost labour joined with the management and technical know-how of Japan to create a new specialism. Those economies that succeed can grow very quickly, producing a “Great Convergence” of poor and rich that provides the book’s title.

正如韓國的轉變一樣，其他新興工業化國家也不再那麼急於把整個產業都佈局在國內，而是試圖引導本國企業融入全球供應鏈。有時這意味着這些國家需要改變自身的比較優勢、而不僅僅是利用。鮑德溫舉了越南的例子，該國加入了本田(Honda)的供應網絡，開始運用引進自本田母公司的生產技術製造摩托車零部件。由此，越南現有的低成本勞動力優勢與日本的管理和技術經驗結合在了一起，創造出了一種新的專長。那些獲得成功的經濟體能以很快的速度增長，進而導致了窮國和富國之間的“大融合”(Great Convergence)，這也正是鮑德溫這本書的書名。

This framework explains a lot about current tensions around globalisation. For one, the stricken manufacturing towns of the American Midwest, many of whose poorer inhabitants switched to voting for Donald Trump, have experienced first-hand what it feels like rapidly to become a redundant link in a global value chain. (Much of this also owes to changing technology, not trade, but as the US trade representative Michael Froman is fond of saying, no one gets a vote on technology.)

這個框架能從很多方面解釋當前圍繞全球化的緊張氛圍。其一是，美國中西部地區受衝擊的製造業城鎮——這些地方的大量低收入居民將選票投給了唐納德•特朗普——親身感受到了在全球價值鏈中迅速變得多餘的滋味。（這種變化在很大程度上是由技術進步而非貿易導致的，但正如美國貿易代表邁克•弗羅曼(Mike Froman)喜歡說的那樣，人們無法對技術進行投票。）

Second, it shows why modern trade deals, such as the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and EU, are centred on rules protecting patents and copyrights, and allowing foreign corporations to sue governments if they feel their investments are being expropriated. Multinationals are less concerned with goods tariffs, which are now generally low and belong to an earlier era of trade governance, than they are with trying to protect the specialist knowledge on which their global supply chains depend.

其二是，該框架展現了現代貿易協議——例如美國與歐盟之間仍在談判的《跨大西洋貿易與投資夥伴關係協定》(Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership)——爲何把重點放在了保護專利和版權的規則，以及允許外國企業在認爲自身投資被侵吞的情況下起訴政府的規則。比起目前總體處於較低水平、屬於貿易管制時代之物的商品關稅，跨國公司如今更關心的是保護自己的全球供應鏈所依存的專業知識。

It also foresees the future of globalisation once technology has relaxed the third constraint, the movement of people. The easier it becomes to manage processes from afar — improved videoconferencing, remote-controlled robots — the more virtual immigration can substitute for actual and the specialisation of global supply chains proceed even faster.

該書還預測了在科技發展放鬆了對人員流動的限制之後全球化的未來走向。遠程管理生產流程變得越容易——例如依靠更好的視頻會議技術或遠程操縱機器人——虛擬人員遷移就越是能夠代替實際遷移，全球供應鏈將以比以往更快的速度走向專門化。

Baldwin’s work seems likely to become a standard, perhaps indispensable, guide to understanding how globalisation has got us here and where it is likely to take us next. There can be few more vital subjects today that will benefit from this sort of clear and comprehensive exposition.

鮑德溫的這本著作很可能將成爲幫助我們理解全球化如何帶領我們走到現在、以及下一步將引領我們走向何方的標準讀物，甚至可能是必讀之書。就當前而言，在能夠受益於這種清晰而全面的論述的議題中，沒有幾個能比全球化議題更重要了。

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, by Richard Baldwin, Harvard University Press, RRP£22.95/$29.95, 344 pages

《大融合：信息技術與新型全球化》(The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization),理查德•鮑德溫著，哈佛大學出版社(Harvard University Press)，建議零售價22.95英鎊/29.95美元，344頁

Alan Beattie is the FT’s Brussels leader writer

艾倫•貝蒂(Alan Beattie)是英國金融時報駐布魯塞爾主筆