老龄化的世界不会步日本后尘 Ageing economies will grow old with grace

What does the future hold for the world’s ageing populations? When experts try to answer this question, they often look at Japan, a country whose demographic profile turned sharply older in the early 1990s. Growth fell, deflation set in and capital investment flatlined. Nominal interest rates stayed incredibly low for a long time.

日益老龄化的世界人口的未来会如何？当专家们尝试回答这个问题时，他们经常会看看日本——在上世纪90年代初，日本的人口结构大大老龄化了。接下来发生的事情是：日本经济增长率下降，通缩来临，资本投资停滞。名义利率在长时期内保持在极低水平。

That outcome, however, owed much to events outside Japan. At the precise moment that large numbers of Japanese people began retiring from the workforce, the rest of the world was awash with labour. People born in the 1970s were just entering the workforce. Hundreds of millions of workers in China and eastern Europe were integrated into the global economy. All of this allowed real wages to fall.

然而，这一结局在很大程度上要归因于发生在日本之外的事情。恰恰在大量日本人开始退出劳动力队伍之际，世界其他地区的劳动力非常充足。上世纪70年代出生的人刚刚加入劳动力大军。中国和东欧的数亿名劳动者融入到全球经济之中。所有这一切，导致实际工资下跌。

Meanwhile, China’s investment boom meant that less investment was needed in the advanced economies, calling real interest rates to fall and asset prices to rise. Taken together, lower wages and higher asset prices could mean only one thing: rising inequality.

另一方面，中国的投资热潮意味着，发达经济体需要的投资更少，导致实际利率下降、资产价格上升。工资降低加上资产价格上升的共同作用，只可能意味着一件事：不平等程度加剧。

In the coming three decades, the populations of many advanced economies will age sharply, just as Japan’s did in the 1990s. So will the populations of north Asia. But the story that unfolded in Japan will not be repeated.

未来三十年，许多发达经济体的人口将大大老龄化，正如上世纪90年代的日本那样。亚洲北部国家也将如此。但日本的故事不会重演。

This time round, demographic change is far more widespread. In Japan, inflation fell when the ageing population dropped out of the global labour force and was replaced by workers elsewhere. But when most of the world grows old at once, there are few places left to turn.

这一次，人口结构变化的覆盖面要广得多。当年日本的老龄人口退出全球劳动力队伍并被其他地区的劳动者取代之际，通胀下降了。但当世界大部分地区同时发生人口老龄化时，没有几个地区可以填补劳动力空缺。

Healthcare is a telling case. People who live longer will require more of it. Meeting that demand will take workers — increasing the demand for labour and lifting real wages, precisely the opposite of what happened in Japan.

医疗是一个颇能说明问题的例子。人的年龄越大，需要的医疗服务将越多。我们需要劳动力来满足这一需求，这会增加劳动力需求并提高实际工资——跟日本当年发生的事情恰恰相反。

Real interest rates, which fell in Japan as the population grew older, are likely to rise in an ageing world. This is because of the balance between savings and investment. Demographics will lower both, but savings will fall by more.

在日本，实际利率随着人口变老而降低。在世界人口老龄化的情况下，实际利率却可能升高，原因就在于储蓄与投资之间的平衡。人口结构将同时降低储蓄和投资，但储蓄的降幅将更大。

Why? For one thing, higher wages will transfer money from the rich to the less well-off, who spend a higher proportion of their income and save correspondingly less. For another, the scarcity of workers will force companies to substitute capital for labour, increasing their investment rate. A third factor is housing. The elderly will resist moving out of their homes; a huge wave of construction will be needed to house the young and the millennials.

为什么？首先，提高工资将把资金从富人手中转移到不太富有的人手中，在后者的收入中，消费所占比例更高，储蓄所占比例相应更低。其次，劳动力短缺将迫使企业以资本取代劳动力，提升企业的投资率。第三个因素是住房。老年人将不愿搬出自己的房子；我们需要启动一波巨大的建设浪潮，为年轻人和千禧一代提供住所。

Since Japan reached its demographic tipping point, the country has endured an unending stream of bad economic news. But the future is not all toil and trouble. Productivity will rise — allowing real wages to rise, too, along with living standards. Even if the rate of growth itself falls, the quality of that growth will thus be quite decent. Per capita income, which is ultimately what matters, will find more support than the headline of falling growth suggests. And lower inequality will create far less social strife than we have seen over the past three decades.

自从达到人口结构拐点以来，日本在经济方面承受了无休无止的坏消息。但未来并非完全是辛劳与麻烦。生产率将会提升——也让实际工资与生活水平一同提高。即便增长率本身降了下来，但增长的质量因此将相当优良。归根到底重要的是人均收入，它将获得比增长率下降的消息所透露出的更大的支撑。不平等程度的减轻也将让社会冲突较过去30年大为缓和。

Most investors equate rising productivity with solid business investment: companies pay for new equipment, which enable employees to produce more output for each hour they work. In the past, substantial investment has usually been forthcoming only at times of widespread optimism about economic prospects. But that need not be the case. As labour becomes scarce and wages rise, profit maximising companies will look to add some physical capital to offset some of those costs. The result will be rising productivity.

大多数投资者把生产率提高视同为实实在在的经营投资：企业花钱买新设备，使得员工在每个工时内生产出更多产品。过去，通常只有在人们普遍看好经济前景时，企业才会进行大举投资。但如今不需要这样。随着劳动力变得稀缺、工资上涨，企业在利润最大化的驱动下将寻求增加一些实物资本以部分抵消前述增加的成本。结果将是生产率提高。

An older world will in many ways be an unrecognisable place. The future of the world economy will be very different from its past. But it will also be quite unlike Japan’s present.

从很多方面来看，一个人口结构更加老龄化的世界将面目全非。世界经济的未来将迥异于它的过去，但也将跟现在的日本大不相同。