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 two workers are using a large steel-bending robot.

德鲁•格林布拉特(Drew Greenblatt)的小工厂位于美国马里兰州巴尔的摩一个破败的地区，他正在视察工厂车间，两名工人正在操作一个大型的钢铁弯轧机器人。

“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.”

“过去这个零部件在中国制造，”他称，“但是由于机器人技术，我们将这项（制造业务）从中国偷走了，如今在美国制造它。”

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.

即便美国制造商采用自动化作为反击制造业岗位向亚洲外流的部分努力，但整个经济的生产率增长仍近乎处于停滞状态。类似的景象正在全球各地上演，这暴露了当今世界经济面临的最紧迫问题。只有印度和撒哈拉以南非洲地区看上去并未出现生产率增长放缓。

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.

由于生产率提高放缓将导致生活水平下降以及公共财政稳定性降低，经济学家对此日益担心。从中期来看，生产率增长是繁荣最重要的推动因素。自金融危机以来，即便失业率已经下滑，但发达国家仍未能摆脱低增长率趋势，这其中的核心问题就是近年来生产率增长疲软。

Janet 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.

上周，美联储主席珍妮特•耶伦(Janet Yellen)在发表演讲时提到了美国“相对疲软”的生产率，敦促推出新的措施以加强教育、促进创业以及提升资本投资。

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.

智库机构世界大型企业联合会(Conference Board)的新数据显示，由于美国、日本和欧洲的表现日益走下坡路，成熟经济体的平均劳动生产率增速由2013年的0.8%降至2014年的0.6%。追踪劳动力、资本等投入使用效率的生产率，往往经过长期演化形成。但是，世界大型企业联合会的数据证实了生产率增长低迷的长期趋势，这一趋势正在全世界范围敲响警钟。

“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.

“过去10年，美国生产率增长表现糟糕，而其他国家相对于美国的差距持续加大，”旧金山联邦储备银行(San Francisco Fed)的经济学家约翰•弗纳尔德(John Fernald)称。

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. George Osborne, the chancellor, last week committed the new Conservative government to boosting productivity.

英国的生产率已经8年未出现改善，打破了一个世纪以来每年增长约两个百分点的趋势。上周，英国财政大臣乔治•奥斯本(George Osborne)向新的保守党(Conservative)政府承诺将提高生产率。

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 compensate fully for slower employment growth over the coming 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.

面对人口迅速老龄化以及就业增长放缓，成熟经济体如果想摆脱生活水平停滞不前的问题，就需要大幅提高生产率。据咨询公司麦肯锡(McKinsey)估算，为了完全弥补未来50年就业增长放缓的影响，生产率增速将需要比过去半个世纪快80%。

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 companies’ willingness to invest in new equipment and ideas, and that more cautious outlook dented productivity.

这种加速能否实现，部分取决于能否确定生产率增速下降的原因。对于乐观主义者来说，糟糕的数据只是衰退的暂时性后遗症。全球需求下滑暂时性地打压了公司投资新设备和新想法的意愿，人们更加谨慎的观点拉低了生产率。

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.

但是，生产率增长放缓先于金融危机；世界大型企业联合会的数据显示，成熟经济体长期以来普遍存在生产率增长放缓的情况。该机构表示，欧洲和日本生产率增长放缓始于上世纪90年代，与之相联系的是技术应用变慢。

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.

通用电气(General Electric)的首席经济学家马可•安农齐亚塔(Marco Annunziata)担心，由于缺乏冒险活动、研发支出较低以及劳动市场缺少灵活性，欧洲可能存在结构性问题。

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.

在美国这个生产率最高的主要经济体中，生产率增长从2005年开始放缓。弗纳尔德表示，这是上世纪90年代信息技术革命带来的暂时性增长红利消失所导致的。

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.

这带来了一种可能性，即美国近期生产率增长低迷实际上是对一种更老、更疲弱趋势的回归。即使在生产率正迎头赶上的新兴经济体，生产率增长也已经放缓。

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 between 2010 and 2015 — that stretched a planned four-year period of austerity in the UK into a decade of public-sector misery.

这会造成重大影响——税收不足的状况延长、公共债务增加。正是这种情况，即2010年至2015年英国生产率增速下降，导致了英国规划的4年紧缩期延长为公共部门十年困难期。

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.

乐观主义者反驳称，生产率出现迅速提升只是时间的问题，并把希望寄托在硅谷(Silicon Valley)等美国IT中心的创新上。

Researchers at Blue River Technology, a California-based agricultural robotics company, 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.

位于加州的农业机器人公司Blue River Technology的研究员描绘了未来农场的样子——成群无人机在空中巡视，大批机器人以及无人驾驶拖拉机照料着生产。该公司的“生菜机器人”队伍已经在工作，它们分布在亚利桑那州和加州的田地间，每小时识别150万株植物并决定如何施肥。

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 companies such as Blue River as evidence.

一些人认为，科技进步最容易的目标已经实现。其他人则认为，世界已步入机器驱动的增长井喷时代，无人驾驶汽车和机器人将取代人类，Blue River之类的公司就是明证。

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 compiling gross domestic product data.

另一种更加乐观的观点认为，将生产率作为生活水平衡量指标的看法如今已过时，因为在教育等公共服务中，质量很难衡量，而在许多消费者技术中，进步也很难捕捉。例如，10年前与Skype发挥同样功效的产品贵得离谱，而如今却是免费的，这提高了人们的生活水平，而无须麻烦统计师编纂国内生产总值(GDP)数据。

“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.”

“这将你带入一个关于进步在发达经济体中意味着什么的未知领域，”曼彻斯特大学(Manchester University)的教授黛安娜•科伊尔(Diane Coyle)称，“消费者福利明显有所增加，增幅很可能还极大，而我们不知道这与GDP有何关联。”

Mismeasurement might explain how many consumers are better off without appearing to have higher incomes in real terms. But statistical arguments cannot raise incomes or tax revenues, nor do they return sectors with previously high productivity growth back to former levels of success.

许多消费者看上去实际收入并未提高，日子却更好过了，原因或许就在于统计失灵。但是，统计学解释无法提高收入或税收，也无法让之前生产率增速较高的行业获得之前那种水平的成功。