Andy Yeh’s Reviews > Stephen Roach on the Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization > Status Update

這本書是我今年花最久時間才讀完的一本書!

With over 60 million layoffs traceable to the state-owned enterprise reforms, job and income insecurity is rife among the Chinese workforce. The lack of a nationwide social safety net, especially social security, pension, medical care, and unemployment insurance, only compounds that problem. As such, Chinese households, motivated by fear of uncertain economic prospects, tend to save more for precautionary reasons.

Macro China has hit a critical sustainability impasse: the macroeconomy is far too reliant on fixed asset investments and exports. Yet Micro China continues to power ahead: the microeconomy is largely driven by autonomous development imperatives at the local level. In the end, fragmentation seriously complicates well-intended policy initiatives of macro control.

As long as low-wage poor countries remain stuck in the export-led growth paradigm, such countries are asking for trouble in an era where the middle-class workers remain under severe pressure. In order to diffuse the macro tensions of the globalization debtate, the developing countries need to consume more. Then the developing countries can offer deep and broad markets to their trading partners in the devleoped world.

As long as low-wage poor countries remain stuck in the export-led growth paradigm, such countries are asking for trouble in an era where the middle-class workers remain under severe pressure. In order to diffuse the macro tensions of the globalization debtate, the developing countries need to consume more. Then the developing countries can offer deep and broad markets to their trading partners in the devleoped world.

The parallels between the crises in Japan and the U.S. are striking. Both economies suffered from the burst of a major asset bubble (property and equity in the case of Japan and property and credit in the case of the U.S.). Both had broken financial systems stemming from egregious risk management blunders. The coupe de grace was the lethal macroeconomic impact of the twin bubbles on the real side of both economies.