全球经济危机会怎么样 低迷生产率困扰世界 机器人解救全球经济

低迷生产率困扰世界 机器人解救全球经济  

Drew Greenblatt surveys the shop floor of his small factory in a down-at-heel district of Baltimore
Maryland
where o workers are using a large steel-bending robot.
“This part used to be made in China
” he says. “But because of the robotics we stole this [manufacturing] from China and now make it in America.”
The introduction of automation at Marlin Steel Wire Products has helped boost employee productivity fourfold since 1998
estimates Mr Greenblatt
whose customers include carmaker General Motors . The gains in efficiency are impressive but they are not being replicated across America.
格林布拉特估计，自1998年以来，马林钢丝产品公司(Marlin Steel Wire Products)引入自动化技术已经帮助将员工的生产率提高了3倍。他的客户包括汽车制造商通用汽车(General Motors)。该公司生产率的提升令人瞩目，但是这种模式并未在美国得到普遍推广。
Even as US manufacturers adopt automation as part of their fightback against offshoring to Asia
productivity growth across the economy is at a near-standstill. A similar picture is being played out across the globe
exposing the most pressing problem in the world economy today. Only India and sub-Saharan Africa seem to be immune from slowing productivity growth.
Economists are increasingly alarmed because slower improvements in efficiency will lead to a fall-off in living standards and less-solid public finances. In the medium term
productivity growth is the most important driver of prosperity. Its weakness in recent years lies at the heart of why advanced nations have remained in a low-growth rut since the financial crisis even as unemployment has fallen.
Ja Yellen
the Federal Reserve chair
raised America’s “relatively weak” productivity in a speech last week and urged new measures to strengthen education
boost entrepreneurship and lift capital investment.
New data from the Conference Board think-tank show that average labour productivity growth in mature economies slowed to 0.6 per cent in 2014 from 0.8 per cent in 2013
as a result of ebbing performances in the US
Japan and Europe. Productivity
which tracks how efficiently inputs such as labour and capital are used
tends to evolve over long periods. But the Conference Board readings confirm a longer-term trend of sagging growth that is setting off alarm bells around the world.
“In the past decade the US has had terrible productivity growth and other countries have been slipping relative to the US
” says John Fernald
an economist at the San Francisco Fed.
In the UK
productivity has not improved in eight years
breaking a trend of roughly 2 per cent annual growth stretching back over a century. Gee Osborne
the chancellor
last week mitted the new Conservative government to boosting productivity.
Faced with rapidly ageing populations and slowing employment growth
mature economies need to boost productivity sharply if they are to escape stagnating living standards. To pensate fully for slower employment growth over the ing 50 years
productivity growth would need to be 80 per cent faster than over the past half-century
according to calculations from McKinsey
the consultancy.
Whether such an acceleration can be achieved depends in part on identifying why growth is slowing. To optimists
the poor numbers are a transitory legacy of the recession. The downturn in global demand has temporarily depressed panies’ willingness to invest in new equipment and ideas
and that more cautious outlook dented productivity.
But the slowdown predated the financial crisis; Conference Board data reveal a longstanding fall in growth across mature economies. In Europe and Japan it started in the 1990s
and is related to slower adoption of technology
it says.
Marco Annunziata
the chief economist at General Electric
worries there is a structural problem in Europe due to a lack of risk-taking
low R&D spending and inflexible labour markets.
In the US
the most efficient of the major economies
productivity growth began to ebb in 2005. According to Mr Fernald
this was a result of the lapsing of temporary growth dividends from the 1990s IT revolution.
This raises the possibility that the recent
dreary productivity growth in the US is actually a return to an older and weaker trend. Even in emerging economies
where efficiency is catching up
the rate of growth has slowed.
This has major implications in terms of a prolonged shortfall in tax revenues and increased public debt. It was just such a scenario — the fall in productivity growth beeen 2010 and 2015 — that stretched a planned four-year period of austerity in the UK into a decade of public-sector misery.
Optimists counter that it is just a matter of time before we see an upsurge in productivity
pointing to innovation in American IT hubs such as Silicon Valley.
Researchers at Blue River Technology
a California-based agricultural robotics pany
envisage farms of the future being surveyed by flocks of drones
and tended by fleets of robots and self-driving tractors. It is already operating teams of “lettuce bots”
which are being dragged across fields in Arizona and California to identify 1.5m individual plants an hour and make decisions on how to fertilise them.
Some argue that the easiest targets for technological progress have already been met. But others say the world is on the cusp of a machine-driven growth spurt
where driverless cars and robots will replace people
and cite panies such as Blue River as evidence.
Another more bullish outlook suggests that the concept of productivity as a measure of living standards is now outdated because quality is difficult to measure in public services such as education
and progress is hard to capture in many consumer technologies. Equivalents to Skype
for instance
were prohibitively expensive a decade ago but now are free
giving people higher standards of living without troubling the statisticians piling gross domestic product data.
“This takes you into uncharted territory about what progress means in advanced economies
” says Professor Diane Coyle of Manchester university. “There has clearly been an increase in consumers’ welfare
probably extremely large
and we don’t know how it is linked to GDP.”
Mismeasurement might explain how many consumers are better off without appearing to have higher ines in real terms. But statistical arguments cannot raise ines or tax revenues
nor do they return sectors with previously high productivity growth back to former levels of success.