Date: 01/11/2014 Platform: Business Standard
We are used to thinking of China as the "factory of the world". However, it is likely that major changes in the country's economic model over the next five to 10 years will cause it to flood the world with cheap capital that will transform China into "the world's investor". How the world adjusts to this deluge of capital will define the next round of economic expansion. One of the likely implications of this shift is that the world will have to either accept a return to large global imbalances or risk a prolonged period of mediocre growth.
China's domestic investment currently accounts for a disproportionate 25.8 per cent of world investment, up from a mere 4.3 per cent in 1995. In contrast, the United States saw its share peak at 36 per cent in 1985 but now accounts for less than 18 per cent. Japan's decline has been even more dramatic from a peak share of 22 per cent in 1993 to barely 5.7 per cent in 2013. Germany's share has declined to 3.5 per cent of world investment and is now roughly the same as India.
China's dominance is driven by the fact that it saves and invests nearly half of its $10.5 trillion economy. However, it is difficult to fruitfully deploy over $5 trillion every year in a country that already has brand new infrastructure, suffers excess manufacturing capacity in many sectors and is trying to shift to services which requires less heavy investment. Moreover, it is aging very rapidly and its working age population is already declining. This is why one should expect its investment rate to decline sharply over the next decade.
Since the current account is the difference between the investment and savings rates, the decline in investment would generate large external surpluses unless savings also decline. The experience of other aging societies like Germany and Japan is that investment rates fall faster than the savings rates. Both these countries have consequently run large, persistent surpluses. However, given China's size, the scale of capital outflow could be so large that it could keep long-term capital cheap around the world even if all the major central banks tighten monetary policy. As the experience of three decades of Yen appreciation shows, an appreciation of the CNY will not correct the problem and may perversely add to it.
So, who will absorb this excess savings? In recent weeks, many well-known economists and policy-makers have argued that the global economy, excluding China, needs a sharp increase in investment, particularly in infrastructure. Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers published a Financial Times column titled "Why public investment really is a free lunch", while IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde argued that an investment boost is needed by the world economy to "overcome a new mediocre".
India is potentially a big beneficiary of this age of low interest rates, especially given Prime Minister Modi's vision of replicating East Asia's economic success by increasing investment in infrastructure and manufacturing. However, from a global balance perspective, the country is unlikely to help absorb a significant portion of China's excess savings. India's share of world investment is merely 3.4 per cent and even a very large expansion in Indian investment will not be able to make up for a small decline in China's. In addition, the experience of the East Asian growth model is that it is ultimately sustained by mobilising domestic savings and pumping out exports. So, India may initially absorb some international capital but, in the long-term, will probably run small deficits or even a surplus.
Other emerging countries are also unlikely to absorb much of China's capital. The IMF's own studies have found that a sudden increase in public investment is likely to cause indebtedness rather than growth in developing countries. Thus, the call by the IMF and others to ramp up public infrastructure spending is really aimed at developed countries. However, Germany's surplus of over six per cent of GDP is so large that the most we can expect from Europe, even if Germany ramps up domestic investment, is that it does not add further to the savings glut.
In others words, a sustained revival in global economic growth boils down to a revival of infrastructure investment in the US. The country has the necessary scale to absorb China's surplus and the poor state of its infrastructure provides many avenues for fruitful deployment of capital. This means that the IMF is effectively advocating a return to large global imbalances where China lends and the US borrows. Far from decrying this as a major failure of global policy co-ordination, I would argue that economists should accept imbalances as the natural state of being and try to manage the resultant distortions.
Virtually every period of globalisation and prosperity through history has been accompanied by symbiotic imbalances. In each case, these imbalances caused economic distortions and complaints, but they endured for surprisingly long periods. For instance, in the first and second centuries AD, the world economy was driven by Indo-Roman trade. Throughout this period, India ran a current account surplus and the Romans kept complaining about the loss of gold - but the system endured for centuries. The same can be said about the original Bretton Woods system which was sustained for over two decades with European capital till it broke down in the early seventies, and Bretton Woods Two which was fed by Asian capital till 2008. The US provided the counterbalancing deficits in both cases.
If Bretton Woods Three fails to take off for whatever reason, we should reconcile ourselves to a long period of weak global demand and low long-term interest rates. History suggests that some of this cheap money would inevitably find its way into trophy assets and bubbles. Either outcome will define the geo-economic and geo-political landscape for a generation.