印度城市化为何输给中国

Expectations are high that India will finally realise its full economic potential through a combination of Modi magic, its abundant young labour force and a more liberal policy regime. A recent adjustment in the country’s accounting has led to claims that it may already have replaced China as the world’s fastest growing economy. Yet, if India is to achieve the same sustained success as China, it needs to take a hard look at why its urbanisation process has failed so miserably in comparison.

人们普遍预期，有了莫迪(Modi)的“魔法”、充裕的年轻劳动力以及更为自由的政策机制，印度最终将充分实现其经济潜力。最近印度调整了国内生产总值(GDP)计算方式，结果使一些人宣称，该国可能已经取代中国成为全球增长最快的经济体。然而，要想像中国那样取得持续成功，印度就需要认真审视一下，与中国相比，本国的城市化进程为何遭遇惨败。

Four decades ago, these two most populous and poor countries faced similar economic prospects. With the bulk of their labour force stuck in subsistence farming and a relative scarcity of natural resources, the success or failure of their development efforts would be defined by their urbanisation process. In 1980, India was further ahead than China with an urbanisation ratio of 25 per cent ratio compared with the latter’s 20 per cent. Today, China has more than doubled its ratio to 53 per cent, while India’s has edged up only slightly to 32 per cent — and even at that level is marked by more pervasive pockets of slums. Some believe that China may have even reached saturation point.

40年前，这两个世界上人口最多、最为贫穷的国家面临类似的经济前景。由于大部分劳动力一直从事自给农业，而且自然资源相对匮乏，它们发展努力的成功与否将由城市化进程决定。1980年，印度的城市化率为25%，比中国的20%领先一步。现在，中国的城市化率增长一倍多至53%，而印度仅略微增长至32%，甚至在这个水平上，它的城市还以更为随处可见的贫民窟为特点。一些人相信，中国的城市化率甚至可能已经达到了饱和点。

China’s rapid industrialisation-driven urbanisation process led to a sustained double-digit surge in real wages, which uplifted some 600m rural people out of poverty and accounted for half the country’s 10 per cent annual gross domestic product growth rates from 1980-2010. In contrast, despite its impressive service-sector development, India has not managed to develop a vibrant manufacturing sector and most of its labour force is still mired in low-productivity rural activities.

中国由工业化驱动的快速城市化进程导致其实际薪资水平持续两位数增长，从而使得约6亿农村人口摆脱贫困，同时中国从1980年到2010年平均每年10%的GDP增长有一半来源于此。相比之下，尽管服务业发展引人瞩目，但印度没有实现制造业部门的蓬勃发展，大部分劳动力仍从事生产率低下的农业活动。

Thus, it is not surprising that many see a revamped urbanisation process as being critical to India’s development agenda. Much of the current discussion has focused on the nuts and bolts of improving urban institutions, education and municipal financing to encourage larger and more productive cities. But most of it misses the point. China’s success occurred despite it having similarly weak institutions and, unlike India, it still has a restrictive residency system that discourages rural workers from relocating to urban commercial centres. However, in today’s India the basic incentives for a more dynamic and productivity-driven urbanisation process do not exist. If they are to be established, there needs to be a much better understanding of the nature of the problem.

因此，并不令人意外的是，许多人认为调整城市化进程对印度的发展日程至关重要。当前讨论大多集中在改善城市制度、教育和市政融资的细节上，目的是促进规模更大、生产效率更高的城市产生。但这种讨论大多没说到点子上。尽管中国的制度同样有缺陷，而且与印度不同，现在它仍保留着阻止农村人口迁移到城市商业中心的限制性户籍制度，但中国仍取得了成功。然而，在今天的印度，并不存在让城市化进程更具活力、以及由生产率推动城市化进程的基本刺激因素。要想创造这些刺激因素，就需要更好地理解问题的本质。

The reason why India has failed and China succeeded can be illustrated by two simple indicators: their respective ratios of urban to rural incomes and the prices of urban property.

两个简单指标可以阐明印度失败而中国成功的原因：两国各自的城市与农村收入比，以及城市房价。

The ratio of incomes gives a sense of the relative differences in productivity between the cities and countryside. For China, this ratio is 3.2 – the highest in world. On average, urban workers are more than three times as productive as rural workers and are being compensated accordingly. No wonder some 270m migrant workers have flocked to the cities to secure better paying industrial jobs. For India, the same measure gives a ratio of 1.6, one of the lowest for emerging market economies, indicating that urban productivity is only moderately higher than in rural areas, and cities do not offer such a magnet of higher earnings.

收入比可以让人们了解城市和农村生产率的相对差距。中国的该比率为3.2，为全球最高水平。平均而言，城市劳动者的生产率是农村劳动者的3倍多，相应的薪酬比也是3倍多。因此约2.7亿农民工蜂拥至城市来从事薪资更高的工业工作就不足为奇了。同时印度的该比率是1.6，在新兴市场经济体中的最低之列，这表明其城市的生产率仅略高于农村地区，城市也缺乏更高收入的吸引力。

The other key indicator is the relative difference in property prices in China versus India. China’s mega-cities have seen a five-fold increase in property prices in renminbi terms, or nearly seven-fold in US dollars over the past decade. No wonder concerns about a possible property bubble in China dominate global financial news. Yet despite these astounding increases, property prices in Beijing and Shanghai are still only half those of their Indian counterparts of New Delhi and Mumbai.

另一个关键指标是中印房价的相对差距。在过去10年里，中国特大型城市的房价按人民币计算上涨了4倍，按美元计算上涨近6倍。难怪全球金融新闻都是对中国房地产泡沫的担忧。然而，尽管房价涨幅惊人，但北京和上海的房价仍然只有印度新德里和孟买的一半。

So because the productivity-related benefits are so much lower in India, the incentive for rural workers to migrate to the cities is much less than in China and this is accentuated by the relatively higher cost of living in Indian cities due to exorbitant property prices. These same inflated property prices coupled with other factors — notably logistical bottlenecks — put Indian manufacturers at a cost disadvantage in competing in global markets despite their lower wages. The net effect is to hobble India’s progress.

因此，由于印度与生产率相关的好处要低得多，农村劳动者迁移至城市的动机就远低于中国，同时由于房价高得离谱，印度城市生活成本相对较高，农村劳动者就更不愿迁移至城市。同样虚高的房价加上其他因素（尤其是物流瓶颈），使得印度制造商在全球市场竞争时处于成本方面的劣势，尽管它们的薪资水平较低。最终结果就是阻碍了印度的发展。

India’s lower urban-to-rural productivity ratio is partly the result of well-recognised distortions in its investment and pricing regime, as highlighted in studies done by the World Bank and IMF. But less widely understood is the negative impact of urban land-management policies.

正如世界银行(World Bank)和国际货币基金组织(IMF)的研究强调的那样，印度城市生产率与农村生产率之比较低，部分是因为其广为人知的投资和定价机制的扭曲，但较少人认识到城市土地管理政策带来的负面影响。

India’s excessively high property prices reflect a combination of two archaic practices. One is the legacy of its colonial past in reserving large parcels of valuable urban land for government use, including sprawling and wasteful estates for civil servants and military cantonments. The other comes from outdated and overly rigid building codes that discourage concentrated development of commercial activity and housing in the core of its major cities. This pushes development to the outer suburbs, making it difficult to realise the agglomeration benefits that drive productivity gains.

印度房价过高反映出两种陈旧做法的影响。一个是过去殖民地时代遗留下来的做法，即将大块宝贵的城市土地保留下来供政府使用，包括为公务员和兵营保留庞大且浪费性的地产。另一个做法则产生于过时且过分僵化的建筑法令，这些法令不鼓励在主要城市的核心区集中开发商业活动和住房。这把开发活动赶到了郊外，从而很难通过集群化来提升生产率。

Unless these issues are addressed, India cannot realise the growth benefits from a more rapid urbanisation-cum-industrialisation process which has characterised China and much of east Asia over the past four decades.

除非这些问题得到解决，否则印度不可能获得更加快速的城市化和工业化进程带来的发展益处——而在过去40年里，快速城市化和工业化是中国和大部分东亚国家的特点。