Es un asunto de lucha por la
hegemonía mundial, donde China es una amenaza real contra EEUU... Muy
interesante este artículo que te recomiendo:
Trump’s Trade War Ignores the Real Threat
JONATHAN GRUBER is Ford Professor of Economics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
SIMON JOHNSON is Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of
Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
China’s economic strategy is no secret. In the short
term, Beijing will grow the country’s economy by manufacturing and exporting
cheap, globally competitive goods. Over the longer term, it will build the
capital, infrastructure, and expertise necessary to make the country an
innovation powerhouse.
China is not the first to adopt this strategy. The
same measures powered the rise of countries such as Germany, France, and Japan
over the last 70 years. And even then they caused considerable trade friction
with the United States. Washington accused all three of those countries of
unfair trade and monetary policies—Germany and France in the 1970s and Japan in
the 1980s. Recent U.S. administrations have accused China of the same. But this
time around, the tension is more concerning. China is much more populous than
Germany, France, or Japan, and its economy could easily become the world’s
largest. Beijing also projects influence beyond its borders, sharing technology
with smaller countries and endeavoring to create a set of close trade and
investment relationships—ones that may one day be based on Chinese renminbi
instead of the U.S. dollar.
In his second term, President Barack Obama tried to
pressure China to change its behavior through alliances and international
cooperation, most notably in the form of a trans-Pacific trading bloc. More
recently, President Donald Trump has taken a confrontational approach and
imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump has labeled China a “currency
manipulator” and seeks to end intellectual property theft and narrow the
U.S.-Chinese trade deficit by waging a trade war.
But Trump’s sights are set on outdated threats.
China’s economic strategy has already mostly succeeded. As a result, Beijing
hasn’t artificially depressed the value of its currency in over a decade, and
it has begun to improve intellectual property protection as a way to encourage
local innovation. The bilateral trade deficit, while asymmetrical, is a bad
reason to launch a trade war. There is no need to balance trade with any single
trading partner, only to make sure the overall balance doesn’t become too
lopsided.
The biggest threat from China is both much more
serious and considerably easier to address than any the Trump administration
has identified. Through government-led investment in research and development,
China is poised to become the global leader in scientific and technological
innovation in the near future, displacing the United States from a position it
has held for 70 years. China’s rise in this area will not only threaten U.S.
national security but deprive the U.S. economy of a great many good jobs.
Instead of sparring with China over trade, the United States should
dramatically increase its own investment in research and development. Only by
spurring domestic innovation can the United States counter China.
THE REAL CHINESE THREAT
That China might one day lead the world in
technological innovation would have seemed laughable a generation ago. The
Cultural Revolution decimated higher education in China. For a decade beginning
in 1966, authorities shuttered schools and universities, sent intellectuals to
labor camps, and effectively suspended scientific research. The educational
system was gradually restored under Deng Xiaoping, but only in the 1990s and
the first decade of this century did investment in higher education produce
significant progress in science and engineering. From 1990 to 2010, Chinese
enrollment in higher education rose eightfold, and the number of college
graduates exploded from 300,000 to nearly three million per year. Over the same
time period, China’s share of total world higher educational enrollment
increased from 6 to 17 percent. In 2017, eight million [1] students graduated
from Chinese universities. By comparison, roughly three million students
graduated from U.S. universities that year.
The quality of scientific education in China can be
debated, but the numbers cannot. In 1990, the United States graduated 20 times
more science and engineering Ph.D.’s than did China. Just two decades later,
China overtook the United States on that metric, minting 29,000 new Ph.D.’s in
2010 to the United States’ 25,000. Chinese universities are still weaker than
their U.S. counterparts, but the gap is closing. Six Chinese universities now
rank in the top 100 global universities, according to the Times Higher
Education ranking [2].
More scientists and more engineers add up, over time,
to more innovation, especially when given adequate funding. Total worldwide
spending [3] on research and development ran about $2 trillion in 2015, the
last year for which data are available. The United States accounted for roughly
a quarter of that spending, down from 37 percent in 2000. China’s share was 21
percent of world R & D spending, or $408.8 billion, up from $33 billion in
2000. In cutting-edge fields such as synthetic biology, clean energy, and
artificial intelligence, China has quickly become an important player.
TECHNOLOGY IS POWER
Nothing illustrates the power of technological
innovation better than the last hundred years of U.S. history. In 1938, on the
eve of World War II, U.S. federal and state governments together spent roughly
0.075 percent of GDP on scientific research, a miniscule amount. By 1944,
federal and state (but mostly federal) governments were spending nearly 0.5
percent of GDP on science—a sevenfold increase that was used to develop radar
systems, penicillin, and the atomic bomb.
The trend continued into peacetime (and into the Cold
War), as the U.S. government channeled public resources into scientific
research on an entirely new scale. From 1940 to 1964, federal funding for
research and development increased twentyfold. At its peak in the mid-1960s,
this spending amounted to roughly two percent of GDP. Modern pharmaceuticals, microelectronics,
digital computers, jet aircraft, satellites, GPS, the Internet, and much more
resulted from this investment. New ideas that came out of government-funded R
& D blossomed into iconic companies like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox.
But in the late 1960s, government spending on research
and development began a slow and steady decline. By the early 1980s, public
spending on R & D had slipped to 1.2 percent of GDP and by 2017 it had
fallen to just over 0.6 percent. Nine countries now outspend the United States
on R & D, when measured as a share of GDP. The picture is slightly more
complicated when private sector spending is taken into account, but the United
States lags behind seven other countries in total public and private R & D
spending. China still spends less than the United States—both in public
spending and in combined public and private spending on R & D—but it is
catching up fast.
The private sector in the United States continues to
innovate, but mostly in the kinds of software projects favored by modern
venture capitalists. Outside of the life sciences, the private sector doesn’t
spend much on attempting fundamental breakthroughs, such as finding new energy
sources, because while new knowledge is great for the economy as a whole, it
seldom pays off for the investors who fund the work. As a result, businesses
have moved away from research that doesn’t have an immediate commercial
application, precipitating a 60 percent decline in publications by corporate
scientists between 1980 and the early 2000s.
In the promising fields of synthetic biology and
hydrogen power, for example, the private sector has largely avoided the kinds
of long-term investments that spawned previous breakthroughs. The United States
pioneered both fields, but they seem more likely to develop in China and other
countries that offer them ample support. And by 2025, China will displace the
United States as the world R & D leader in pharmaceuticals, according to a
recent analysis of medical research published by The Journal of the American
Medical Association.
A BETTER STRATEGY
To avoid being overtaken by China, the United States
should increase federal government support for scientific research as well as
efforts to translate that research into products and services that can be
brought to market. Government R & D spending has a remarkably high rate of
social return, meaning that the benefits are spread widely throughout society.
Based on recent studies of government support for civilian- and
military-oriented research in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand, we
estimate that a federal government commitment of $100 billion per year to R
& D would help create roughly four million good new jobs. The most
productive use of such funding would be to upgrade the physical infrastructure
that supports science, including new laboratories, expanded graduate programs,
and incubators for developing capital-intensive technologies that may take a
long time to perfect.
Wherever possible, the government should look for
productive ways to spread this investment around the country. Innovation
increasingly takes place in a few highly concentrated hubs where talented
people congregate—places such as Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los
Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. But with restrictive
zoning and high housing prices, these hubs have become expensive and congested.
Investing in places where land is cheap and people have the potential to become
much more productive will help redress regional disparities in opportunity and
employment, while at the same time
building an advantage over international competitors
by drawing more Americans into the scientific enterprise. In our book
Jump-Starting America [4], we identify 102 urban communities that are plausible
next-generation tech hubs. Spread across 36 states in all regions of the
country, these cities and towns have large populations, highly educated
workers, and a low cost of living. Examples include Rochester, New York; Baton
Rouge, Louisiana; and Topeka, Kansas. To turn these cities into tech hubs, the
federal government should support collaboration between universities, private
businesses, and local governments with the aim of making higher education more
affordable, expanding practical and technical training, and creating pipelines
from local educational institutions to employers. Together, these
public-private consortiums could work to keep housing costs affordable by
overhauling zoning law to allow for sufficient construction.
The best way to counter China is to out-invent it—and
to turn inventions into products and services that people around the world want
to buy. The United States was once very good at this. China’s rise should
remind the United States that it can and should renew its commitment to
technological and scientific advancement.
Links [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/higher-education-in-china-has-boomed-in-the-last-decade
Abrazos,
PD1: Lo más cristiano del mundo
es rezar por los enemigos, por la gente que no nos gusta… Qué clarito lo dice
aquí el Papa, pese a que habrá muchos que no les guste. Se debe rezar siempre
por los gobernantes, para que su labor sea justa y redunde en una mejora social
y del bien común…
