双语•智库 | “全球化”在倒退？不，只是换了一个新形式

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过去数十年，全球化对世界发展作出了重要贡献，已成为不可逆转的历史潮流。但近年来，受世界各地持续动荡的政治、经济形势的影响，“逆全球化”思潮也在不断涌现。那么，究竟该如何看待“全球化”及“逆全球化”？“双语•智库”第二十一期，为您译介《纽约时报》资深经济通讯记者Neil Irwin解读当前全球化的文章《全球化冲击来了，时间却不太对》（Globalization's Backlash Is Here, at Just the Wrong Time），以供参考。

No one should be surprised that there has been a backlash to globalization, given the scale of disruption that has resulted from more interconnected economies. What is surprising is that it has arrived now.

全球化出现逆势不足为奇，因为各经济体之间相互联系的加强，导致了混乱范围有所扩大。令人意外的是如今逆全球化已经到来。

That’s because globalization, at least in the form we have known it, leveled off a decade ago. And that shows a crucial risk of the recent push to re-set the terms of the global economy — including tariffs on steel and aluminum and punitive actions against China that President Trump has introduced.

这是因为我们所熟知的全球化进程在十年前就已趋向平稳，因此，最近重新制定全球经济条款的举措就成了一个严重隐患——包括美国总统特朗普提出对钢铁和铝产品征收关税和针对中国的惩罚性措施。

It is coming after the major costs of globalization have already been borne. And it comes just as billions of people who have become integrated into the global economy over the last three decades are starting to become rich enough to become valuable consumers.

逆全球化是在人们承担了全球化的主要代价之后出现的。而与此同时，在过去30年中融入全球经济的数十亿人开始变得富有，成为重要的消费者。

In short, the anti-globalization drive that is spreading across the Western world may be coming at exactly the wrong time — too late to do much to save the working-class jobs that were lost, but early enough to risk damaging the ability of rich nations to sell advanced goods and services to the rapidly expanding global middle class.

简言之，正在西方世界蔓延的逆全球化势头或许不合时宜，对挽救已经失去的工人阶级的工作来说为时已晚，做再多都于事无补；但就富裕国家向迅速壮大的全球中产阶级出售高级商品与服务而言，损害这种能力为时尚早。

It is tempting to think of globalization as a constant process, but historically that’s not the case. It moves in fits and starts, and occasional reversals. The 1990s and the first years of the 2000s were one of those extraordinary periods in which economies became more interconnected, according to a range of data.

把全球化视为一个持续不断的过程虽然能引起人们的兴趣，但历史上却并非如此。全球化进程时断时续，有时会发生逆转。一系列数据显示，上世纪90年代和21世纪头几年是经济体高度互通的特殊时期之一。

Now, globalization has entered a new phase, in which cross-border trade in goods and services is steady as a share of the economy, and the international flows of capital are lower than they were before the global financial crisis. It is now the spread of information that is rising, with different implications for workers in rich countries than the earlier phase.

现在，全球化进入了新的阶段。在这个阶段，货物和服务的跨境贸易在经济中所占的份额保持稳定，国际资本流动低于全球金融危机之前的水平。现在信息传播得越来越广，这对富裕国家工人的影响与先前时期有所不同。

Starting in the 1990s, improvements in communications and shipping technology made global outsourcing more feasible. Trade deals reduced tariffs and other barriers to commerce. And many once-poor nations became more integrated into the global economy, especially China.

从上世纪90年代开始，通信和航运技术的改进使全球外包更加可行，贸易协议降低了关税和其他贸易壁垒。许多曾经贫穷的国家更多地融入全球经济，尤其是中国。

This adjustment provided a wave of affordable goods and opened up new markets for rich countries, but it also devastated certain sectors and geographical areas, especially those involved in manufacturing low-tech products. Workers in American and Western European factory towns found themselves in competition with Chinese electronics assemblers, Indian call center employees and auto factory workers in Eastern Europe, Mexico and beyond.

这种调整为富裕国家提供了一波价格实惠的商品，开辟了新的市场，但也对某些行业和地理区域带来不利影响，特别是那些涉及制造低技术含量产品的行业和地区。美国和西欧工厂区的工人就发现自己在与中国电子组装商、印度呼叫中心员工和东欧、墨西哥等地的汽车工厂工人竞争。

The flow of goods and services across national borders as a share of all economic activity hovered near 16 percent through the 1980s and early 1990s, then from 1993 to 2008 shot up to 31 percent. Then it stopped rising, instead bouncing around that level, according to data from the McKinsey Global Institute.

20世纪80年代和90年代早期，在所有经济活动中，商品和服务的跨国流通所占比例一直徘徊在16%左右；自1993年至2008年，这一比例上升到31%。而后，根据麦肯锡全球研究所的数据，数字停止了增长，而是在这一水平波动。

If you look at the international flow of money instead of goods and services, the results are even more stark. Cross-border financial flows peaked in 2007 at 22 percent of world G.D.P., but were down to 6 percent in 2016, about the same as the 1996 level.

如果你放眼国际资金流动，而不是商品和服务，结果会更加明显。跨境资金流动在2007年达到顶峰，占全球GDP的22%，但在2016年降至6%，与1996年的水平大致相同。

“The interesting thing about tariffs on steel or other goods is that it’s fighting the last battle, not the future one,” said Susan Lund, a partner at McKinsey who has researched these global flows. “Global manufacturing has already reconfigured itself. That change happened, and the horse is out of the barn. We don’t think globalization is over, but it has taken a new form.”

“对钢铁或其他商品征收关税的有趣之处在于，它聚焦当下，而非未来，”曾研究过这些全球流动的麦肯锡合伙人苏珊·伦德表示，“全球制造业已经重新自我调整。变化已然出现，亡羊补牢犹时未晚。我们不认为全球化已经结束，而是变成了一种新的形式。”

That form consists of greater connectivity and communication, which may not show up in traditional data on trade or capital flows. That includes more people using social media platforms to connect with people in other countries, companies relying on freelance labor located around the globe, and small enterprises doing business with partners around the world through the internet.

这种形式包括更广泛的联系和沟通，这些可能不会出现在贸易或资本流动的传统数据中，例如更多人使用社交媒体平台与其他国家的人建立联系，公司可以依靠全球各地的自由职业者，以及中小企业能够通过互联网与世界各地的合作伙伴做生意。

In other words, it’s not a form of globalization that endangers factory jobs, but one that could have big consequences in other areas — leading to more competition for technologically advanced white-collar jobs, while also creating enormous new opportunities for American and Western European firms. That, in turn, helps explain why much of the trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that the Trump administration withdrew from, focused on intellectual property rights, data security and privacy.

换句话说，这不是一种危及工厂就业的全球化形式，而是一种可能在其他领域产生重大影响的全球化——为技术先进的白领工作带来更强的竞争力，同时也为美国和西欧企业创造巨大的新机遇。反过来，这也有助于解释为什么特朗普政府退出的《跨太平洋伙伴关系协定》主要侧重于知识产权、数据安全和隐私问题。

The M.I.T. economist David Autor said, “The China shock on large-scale manufacturing and its mass employment effects, that part is largely behind us,”  Now, the challenge is Chinese competition on more technologically complex products, like automobiles, airplanes or microprocessors. The manufacturing of more labor-intensive, less technologically complex products like apparel is migrating to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

麻省理工学院经济学家大卫·奥特尔说：“中国对大规模制造业的冲击及其对大众就业的影响很大程度上已被我们抛之脑后。” 现在，我们所面临的挑战是中国在汽车、飞机、微处理器等技术较为复杂的产品上的竞争力。像服装这种劳动力密集型、技术不算复杂的产品的生产正在转移至工资较低的国家，如孟加拉国和埃塞俄比亚。

▲麻省理工学院经济学家大卫·奥特尔（David Autor）

But a shift in where certain products are made is different from a net increase in the level of global connectivity. The level of economic integration is remaining level, even as the details of exactly what is made in which country are changing.

但是，某些特定产品的产地发生变化，这与全球互联程度的净增长有所不同。即便是“生产哪种产品”“在哪个国家生产”这些具体细节发生变化，经济一体化的水平也会保持稳定不变。

“I don’t think there’s any turning back the clock,” Mr. Autor said, referring to a return to a world where less technologically complex and more labor-intensive products are again made in the United States. “I think we should be girding ourselves for the real challenge, which is struggles over intellectual property and frontier industries.”

奥特尔在谈及回到一个技术不太复杂、更多劳动密集型产品重新在美国生产的世界时表示：“我觉得不太可能回到过去。我认为我们应该为真正的挑战做好准备，即知识产权和前沿行业的斗争。”

The Trump administration’s efforts to pressure China, if they succeed, would do some of that. But those actions have been paired with tariffs on steel and aluminum that appear more aimed at protecting American manufacturing of the metals. The administration’s approach could backfire if it unleashes a series of escalating tit-for-tat tariffs on all sorts of goods, undermining global commerce without fixing the underlying problems in information-intensive industries.

特朗普政府试图向中国施压，如果他们成功的话，就会采取一定的措施。但这些措施往往伴随着对钢铁和铝制品征收关税，似乎旨在保护美国对这些金属制品的生产。如果美国政府针锋相对，对各种商品不断加征关税、破坏全球贸易，而不解决信息密集型产业的潜在问题，那么这种做法可能就会适得其反。

If the latest trade skirmishes do blow up into a trade war, those new barriers to international commerce might also block a long-predicted reward of globalization: a new world of customers. The rise in global economic integration, for all the disruption it has meant for certain workers in the United States and Western Europe, has also been a story of hundreds of millions of people becoming more connected to the worldwide economy, and achieving higher standards of living in the process.

如果最近发生的贸易冲突升级成一场贸易战，国际交易中的新壁垒也可能会阻碍人们预言已久的全球化能带来的好处：一个全新的消费者世界。全球经济一体化的崛起对某些美国和西欧的工人来说是一种颠覆，同时也让数亿人与世界经济联系在一起，并在这一过程中达到了更高的生活水平。

Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, studies the rise of the global middle class - today 45 percent population are now able to afford the luxuries that the global economy provides: abundant food, motorized transportation, mobile phones and the like.

布鲁金斯学会高级研究员霍米·哈拉斯对全球中产阶级的崛起进行的研究显示——今天，45%的人口能够负担得起全球经济提供的奢侈品：丰富的食品、机动交通、移动电话等。

▲布鲁金斯学会高级研究员霍米·哈拉斯（Homi Kharas）

Mr. Kharas argues that it’s wrong to view these billions of people only as competition for good jobs.

哈拉斯先生认为，把这几十亿人仅仅看作是为了得到好的工作而竞争是错误的。

“What we see is that as the middle class emerges, they have a massive demand for all types of services,” he said. “Whether that is Hollywood movies or Bollywood movies or Hong Kong movies, or the ability to eat out in franchises like KFC or McDonald’s, or using internet applications, or taking out insurance, they’re driving massive changes in the structure of the global economy that include consuming goods that the United States is good at producing.”

“我们所看到的是，随着中产阶级的出现，他们对所有类型的服务都有巨大的需求，”他说，“无论他们是看好莱坞电影、宝莱坞电影还是香港电影，或是在肯德基或麦当劳等特许经营店就餐，或是使用互联网应用程序、或购买保险，这些需求都在推动全球经济结构发生巨大变化，其中也包括美国擅长生产的消费品。”

In other words, globalization shouldn’t be viewed as a perpetual onslaught in which American workers are facing waves of more and more people willing to do the same job for lower wages — even though it may have seemed that way during the 1990s and early 2000s when trade was soaring faster than the global economy.

换句话说，全球化不应被视为一场永久性的冲击——美国工人正面临着越来越多的人愿意接受做同样的工作工资却比以前少这一事实——尽管在上世纪90年代和本世纪初贸易增速快于全球经济增长的时候，情况似乎也是这样。

Rather, everyone is both a competitor and a customer. With trade battles looming on the near horizon, the open question is whether the United States and Europe, having already borne the costs of competition with the developing world, will stick with open trade long enough to enjoy its benefits.

相反，每个人同时既是竞争对手，也是客户。随着贸易战近在咫尺，一个悬而未决的问题是，已经承担了与发展中国家竞争成本的美国和欧洲，是否会坚持开放贸易足够长的时间，以享受到其好处。

来源：纽约时报（有删节）

编译：Yee君

本文仅代表原作者观点，不代表译·世界立场和观点

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