中国到2050年的（粗略）经济轨迹（英）

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1 China’s (Rough) Economic Trajectory to 2050 By Derek Scissors April 2023 Key Points • Since the Chinese economy has matured and the policy trend is established, long-term forecasting should be more accurate. It’s still imprecise, of course, and vulnerable to any sharp domestic change. • The COVID-19 pandemic and recovery interrupted an economic slowdown that began in 2011 and will resume in 2024–25. China will still outperform in the 2020s, but its tra-jectory will be unmistakable by the end of the decade. • The 2030s will be worse. Aging will be the principal reason, augmented by a large debt burden and (unless lifted) self-imposed constraints on innovation. In the 2040s, these factors will effectively bring growth to a halt. Normally, a country’s short-term economic out-look is clearer than its long-term outlook. As of early spring 2023, however, there are many ques-tions about China’s short-term outlook. How sharp and durable will the rebound be from lifting the “zero-COVID” policy? Can Chinese consumers actually lead growth? Will the new government of Xi Jinping loyalists allow even a bit of pro-market reform? Answering these questions is guesswork, notwithstanding the many people constantly guessing. China’s long-term outlook is actually more sure, as its economy is far less dynamic than it was 15 years ago. There’s a dispute over whether it could have stayed dynamic for longer, but in any case, loss of dynamism has at least one benefit: It makes fore-casting more accurate. While predicting in 1979 how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would look in 2004 would have been extremely difficult, predicting today how the PRC will look in 2048 is far easier. This also sidesteps the issue of data qual-ity, as a generation of weakness is impossible to hide. The base case: After the post-COVID surge fades in 2024, China will return to the slowdown path it walked in the 2010s. By the 2030s, it will be old before it can reasonably be considered rich. In the 2040s, it will keep getting older and stop get-ting at all richer. This may seem a bearish view; it’s not. The bear case moves stagnation closer, while the bull case puts it off for longer. The PRC’s fun-damentals, featuring but not limited to demogra-phy, ensure stagnation, then decline. There is certainly potential variation in perfor-mance, chiefly from domestic economic policy. A quick return to pro-property rights and pro-competition reform would make the PRC much more prosperous. There appears to be no chance at all of this happening while General Secretary Xi remains a Mao Zedong–like figure. He intends to remain so for as long as possible, and there is no AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 2 guarantee his eventual successor will change the policy set. Those continuing to advertise China’s economic future may be counting on the country producing technological breakthroughs, but Xi’s own decisions make this unlikely.1 Ways to Be Wrong Delineating spec