On August 24, at a financial forum held by the Institute of Finance of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Cai Fang, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, chief expert of the national high-end think tank and member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank, delivered a speech on the theme of "China's Productivity Paradox". He said China's productivity gains are no longer low-hanging fruits and are no longer readily available.
Cai Fang pointed out that the disappearance of the demographic dividend has not only brought about labor shortages, weakening of the advantage of catching up with the latecomers, slowing down the improvement rate of human capital, and declining return on investment, but also caused the loss of the demographic dividend to lead to weak productivity improvement.
In his view, China's labor productivity growth has entered a deceleration stage, which is both the natural result of changes in the development stage and the collateral effects of policy responses.
"The danger of total factor productivity growth stagnation facing China lies mainly in the rigidity and degradation of resource allocation." Cai Fang said that the rigidity of resource allocation mainly refers to the survival of the fittest that the market has not fully achieved entry, exit, survival and death; the degradation of resource allocation is reflected in the deviation between the expansion of employment and the direction of labor productivity improvement, that is, productivity improvement is the result of more capital input and less labor input, and the decline in the proportion of manufacturing industry leads to labor flow to the tertiary industry with low productivity. Correspondingly, there is a divergence in productivity and wages in China.
Cai Fang pointed out that developed countries such as the United States and Japan have also encountered the problem of rigid resource allocation and resource allocation degradation, which provides us with a lot of reference.
In his view, the difficulty of productivity gains is related to the fact that we have not yet completed the transition to productivity growth models. "Our productivity gains are no longer low-hanging fruits, they can be improved by reaching out. Productivity at higher stages of development depends on creative destruction. ”
When talking about specific measures, Cai Fang suggested that social protection can make full use of the creative destruction mechanism. "Once the inclusive protection of people at the social level can eliminate the excuse of protecting inefficient enterprises, excess capacity, backward industries and even outdated jobs at the micro level, and push all enterprises to full competition, so as to achieve the organic unity of fairness and efficiency."
Cai Fang stressed that the improvement of the total GDP and per capita level means that the social cake is constantly growing, and higher requirements are put forward for the good cake, and the construction of welfare society is the ultimate path, and it is also an unavoidable task and the goal of common prosperity in China's modernization construction.
Beijing News shell financial reporter Hu Meng Editor Song Yuting Proofreader Wei Zhuo
![Cai Fang led 13 experts to write the "Outline of Double Circulation" to dissect the economic trend in the next decade[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)