欧洲钢铁业的贸易防卫战 European steelmakers point the finger at China

Where the steel industry is involved, especially in rich countries, shutteRed plants, job losses and complaints about unfair competition are rarely far away.

但凡涉及钢铁行业，尤其是在富裕国家，工厂倒闭、工作岗位流失和对不公平竞争的抱怨几乎从未远去。

Having seen global steel prices halve over the past year, European steel-makers are ratcheting up their choruses of complaint. Yesterday they demanded blocks on cheap steel imports, particularly from China, and lower energy input prices.

过去一年，全球钢铁价格下跌了一半，欧洲钢铁制造商正一同加大抗议的声音。昨日，它们要求阻止进口廉价的钢铁（尤其是来自中国的钢铁），并降低能源投入的价格。

The impact of steel plant closures can be devastating for local communities. The recent closure of the Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) plant at Redcar in north-east England was a severe blow to a town with few other job opportunities. But resorting to wide-scale protectionism is only likely to displace job losses elsewhere. And while there is certainly a case for the EU to revisit the cost of power to energy- intensive industries, it is not clear that would do much to mitigate the damage the steel industry is sustaining.

钢铁厂倒闭对当地社区的影响可能是毁灭性的。近来，泰国伟成发钢铁工业(SSI)在英格兰东北部雷德卡(Redcar)的工厂倒闭，对这个几乎没有其他工作机会的小城造成了重创。但诉诸大规模贸易保护主义只有可能将失业转至别处。尽管欧盟的确有理由重新考虑能源密集型产业的能源成本，但目前还不清楚这能否大大减轻钢铁行业正在遭受的损害。

Steel has long been a battleground for trade disputes. With high fixed costs of production, and exposed to large swings in demand from the economic cycle, the industry goes through repeated phases of overcapacity, glut and falling prices, with governments implored to intervene to keep production going and preserve jobs.

长期以来，钢铁一直是贸易争端的战场。钢铁行业固定生产成本高，经济周期导致的需求大幅波动还容易对它造成冲击，因此这个行业一次次重复经历产能过剩、供过于求、价格下跌的阶段，政府被恳求进行干预，以维持生产并保留工作机会。

European steelmakers have frequently had recourse to antidumping and antisubsidy tariffs to tackle low-cost products entering the EU market. A larger-scale use of such “trade defence” measures is likely to do more harm than good. Not only does it risk inflaming EU-China trade tensions more generally, but raising the price of steel in Europe will merely disadvantage other manufacturers.

欧洲钢铁制造商时常诉诸反倾销和反补贴关税，以应对进入欧盟市场的低成本产品。更大规模地使用这种“贸易防卫”措施，可能会弊大于利。这不仅有可能在更大范围内激化欧盟和中国紧张的贸易关系，且抬高欧洲钢铁的价格只会对欧洲其他行业的制造商不利。

Steelmaking is of great importance to local communities, but it employs only about 1 per cent of the 30m total manufacturing workers in Europe. Since steel is a vital input to large parts of manufacturing, holding prices in the EU above the global level merely spreads international uncompetitiveness more widely through the sector. The future for European manufacturing is in high value-added production, such as Germany’s successful machine tools sector, not in churning out basic commodities in a fickle global market.

钢铁制造对当地社区十分重要，但这个行业雇佣的劳动者仅占欧洲3000万制造业工人的1%左右。由于钢铁对于更广泛的制造业是一种重要原料，将欧洲钢铁价格维持在高于全球价格的水平，只会让欧洲更多制造业行业在国际上失去竞争力。欧洲制造业的未来在于高附加值制造（比如德国成功的机床业），而不在于在变化无常的全球市场中生产基础大宗商品。

The industry, or at least parts of it, is on somewhat firmer ground when it complains about energy costs. Successive iterations of energy taxes and levies aimed at combating climate change have undoubtedly made industrial electricity more expensive. But that is often a bigger problem between different EU states than it is between the EU and the rest of the world.

这个行业（或者至少这个行业的一部分）在抱怨能源成本的时候理由更充分一些。为对抗气候变化而不断增收的能源税费无疑使工业用电更加昂贵。但这个问题往往在不同欧盟国家之间（而非欧盟和世界其他地区之间）更为突出。

UK producers, for example, complain their electricity is more than 50 per cent more costly than for competitors in France or Germany. But the European Commission last year found that while electricity prices for EU companies as a whole were twice those in the US and 20 per cent higher than in China, the differential with the US disappeared once tax and levy exemptions for European energy-intensive industries were taken into account.

比如，英国钢铁制造商抱怨，它们的电力价格比法国或者德国竞争对手高50%以上。但欧盟委员会(European Commission)去年发现，尽管欧盟境内企业的整体电力价格是美国的两倍，也比中国高出20%，但一旦算上欧洲能源密集型工业税费的减免，欧盟和美国之间的差距就不复存在了。

Moreover, energy inputs are on average only about 5 per cent of total production costs for the EU iron and steel industry. Electricity prices relative to those elsewhere would have to change spectacularly to have a decisive effect.

此外，能源投入平均只占欧盟钢铁产业总生产成本的约5%。只有用电价格相对于欧盟以外地区出现明显变化，才会有决定性效果。