老齡化的世界不會步日本後塵 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.

日益老齡化的世界人口的未來會如何？當專家們嘗試回答這個問題時，他們經常會看看日本——在上世紀90年代初，日本的人口結構大大老齡化了。接下來發生的事情是：日本經濟增長率下降，通縮來臨，資本投資停滯。名義利率在長時期內保持在極低水平。

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，這一結局在很大程度上要歸因於發生在日本之外的事情。恰恰在大量日本人開始退出勞動力隊伍之際，世界其他地區的勞動力非常充足。上世紀70年代出生的人剛剛加入勞動力大軍。中國和東歐的數億名勞動者融入到全球經濟之中。所有這一切，導致實際工資下跌。

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，中國的投資熱潮意味着，發達經濟體需要的投資更少，導致實際利率下降、資產價格上升。工資降低加上資產價格上升的共同作用，只可能意味着一件事：不平等程度加劇。

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.

未來三十年，許多發達經濟體的人口將大大老齡化，正如上世紀90年代的日本那樣。亞洲北部國家也將如此。但日本的故事不會重演。

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.

這一次，人口結構變化的覆蓋面要廣得多。當年日本的老齡人口退出全球勞動力隊伍並被其他地區的勞動者取代之際，通脹下降了。但當世界大部分地區同時發生人口老齡化時，沒有幾個地區可以填補勞動力空缺。

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.

醫療是一個頗能說明問題的例子。人的年齡越大，需要的醫療服務將越多。我們需要勞動力來滿足這一需求，這會增加勞動力需求並提高實際工資——跟日本當年發生的事情恰恰相反。

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，實際利率隨着人口變老而降低。在世界人口老齡化的情況下，實際利率卻可能升高，原因就在於儲蓄與投資之間的平衡。人口結構將同時降低儲蓄和投資，但儲蓄的降幅將更大。

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.

爲什麼？首先，提高工資將把資金從富人手中轉移到不太富有的人手中，在後者的收入中，消費所佔比例更高，儲蓄所佔比例相應更低。其次，勞動力短缺將迫使企業以資本取代勞動力，提升企業的投資率。第三個因素是住房。老年人將不願搬出自己的房子；我們需要啓動一波巨大的建設浪潮，爲年輕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.

自從達到人口結構拐點以來，日本在經濟方面承受了無休無止的壞消息。但未來並非完全是辛勞與麻煩。生產率將會提升——也讓實際工資與生活水平一同提高。即便增長率本身降了下來，但增長的質量因此將相當優良。歸根到底重要的是人均收入，它將獲得比增長率下降的消息所透露出的更大的支撐。不平等程度的減輕也將讓社會衝突較過去30年大爲緩和。

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.

大多數投資者把生產率提高視同爲實實在在的經營投資：企業花錢買新設備，使得員工在每個工時內生產出更多產品。過去，通常只有在人們普遍看好經濟前景時，企業纔會進行大舉投資。但如今不需要這樣。隨着勞動力變得稀缺、工資上漲，企業在利潤最大化的驅動下將尋求增加一些實物資本以部分抵消前述增加的成本。結果將是生產率提高。

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.

從很多方面來看，一個人口結構更加老齡化的世界將面目全非。世界經濟的未來將迥異於它的過去，但也將跟現在的日本大不相同。