How to sustain economic growth in Asia

I have chosen a topic which is inseparable from the subject of development, and that is economic growth. More specifically, I would like to discuss how we can sustain economic growth in Asia. As Robert Lucas correctly pointed out, “Once one starts to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else.”  Therefore, I will take off my central bank governor’s cap for a while, and there will be no mention tonight of either “unconventional monetary policy” or “quantitative and qualitative monetary easing”.

In recent years, the question of how to sustain economic growth has become an increasing preoccupation both within academia and among policymakers. The debate on the “secular stagnation” of mature economies is one manifestation of this.

Given the tendency of regression to the mean, even rapidly growing emerging economies may eventually face similar challenges.

In the light of these discussions, whether Asia can sustain its robust economic growth over the coming decades may not be a particularly comfortable question, but it is nonetheless a question worth asking.

I will first consider a number of stylised facts regarding economic growth in Asia. Then, I will move on to a discussion of how economic growth in Asia might be sustained.

 

Three stylised facts

 

The first stylised fact that I want to consider is that Asia has grown almost constantly at a very rapid pace over a number of decades. Chart 1 shows per capita GDP by region. It is quite impressive that Asia, which was at the lowest level in 1950, has outperformed the other regions in terms of growth. In this long-term context, the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 seems to have been just a slight hiccup. The average growth rate over the last 60 years or so is about 4 per cent per year. Thanks to the power of compound interest, this makes Asian per capita GDP now 12 times as large as that in 1950. No wonder Asian economies are often characterised as “dynamic Asia”.

The second stylised fact is the large degree of heterogeneity, or diversity in plain English, in the level of per-capita GDP. As illustrated in Chart 2, the Asian NIEs (Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) and Japan enjoy very high levels of income, whereas most Asian countries – and in fact most of the population of Asia – belong to the middle-income group.

Even within the middle-income group, individual countries differ considerably in their levels of per capita GDP.

Economists studying economic growth rely primarily on estimates of GDP, but they sometimes check these statistics against data from other sources. One simple and visually impressive yardstick of economic prosperity is the amount of artificial light that can be seen at night from space.

Chart 3 shows such an image for Asia. This not only confirms the aforementioned heterogeneity across Asian countries, but also shows the heterogeneity within a country. For instance, coastal China is as bright as South Korea and Japan, but light becomes sparse as you move inland. Likewise, the area around Delhi in India, or Bangkok in this country, is quite bright, but there are plenty of darker areas as well.

In my presentation, I loosely follow their definitions by using thresholds of US$12,000 and $1,000 per capita GDP.

The third stylised fact relates to the heterogeneity in growth rate of per capita GDP. As I said, Asia as a whole has maintained a growth rate of about 4 per cent for more than half a century, as shown in the left-hand-side panel of Chart 4.

However, once we plot the growth rates of individual economies, the diversity in the nature of the region’s economic development becomes immediately apparent. The graph also reveals that there were shifts in the region’s “rising stars”. Japan recorded double digit growth in the 1960s, but its growth rate became subdued thereafter. Instead, the Asian NIEs took over the position of very rapid growth economies, followed by China more recently.

If we redraw the picture, not against time horizons but against income levels, as shown in the right-hand-side panel of Chart 4, there emerges a pattern of development stages. Growth rate tends to become higher once a country makes the transition from the low-income to the middle-income stage. The growth rate reaches its peak when an economy is at the middle-income stage. After that, it tends to become slower, especially once a country enters the high-income stage.

 

Three traps for growth

Can Asian countries sustain their rapid economic growth for the foreseeable future? If history is any guide, we could expect another rising star to emerge in Asia. It is by no means guaranteed, however. Even if it is the case, we cannot entirely count on one single rising star.

The growth rate of relatively high-income Asian economies needs also to be sustained at a reasonably high level if the prosperity of the regional economy as a whole is to be maintained.

I believe there are three traps which we must avoid falling into if we are to sustain economic growth in Asia. Despite the heterogeneity which we have observed, these three traps are relevant to many countries in the region, albeit to varying degrees, depending on the circumstances. 

The first trap is the “middle-income trap”.

History shows that many economies have faced difficulties in advancing beyond the status of a middle-income economy once they have exploited the growth opportunities provided by imported technology and abundant labour force from rural areas. Such an inflection point is known as the Lewisian Turning Point. Up to that point, growth accounting analysis generally indicates that a country tends to register high economic growth through vast capital accumulation, rapidly rising total factor productivity and continued increases in labour input. Once such a point has been reached, however, growth is likely to decelerate. Nevertheless, it is still possible for a country reaching the Lewisian Turning Point to continue growing, although at a somewhat decelerated pace, through technological advances and cultivation of new markets.

In the region, Japan and the NIEs managed to overcome this trap and join the group of high-income countries in the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively – as you can see in the right-hand panel of Chart 4 again. China and some Asean countries, including Thailand, have already reached the upper middle-income stage, which means that they have great opportunities to advance further toward high-income status. Moreover, there are many other countries in the region that are still at the lower middle-income stage, but with great potential for continued growth for years to come.

The second challenge is the “demographic trap”. A number of economies in the region, particularly those at the high-income stage and, to a lesser extent, at the upper middle-income stage, are experiencing, or about to experience, population ageing: the result of longer life expectancies combined with lower fertility rates. From the viewpoint of per-capita income growth, which I believe is an appropriate measure of “living standard”, what really matters is the proportion of the working-age population to the population as a whole. Population ageing implies a continued decline in the proportion of the working-age population, which in turn poses a challenge to sustaining per-capita income growth, as a given income earner has to transfer a larger share of his or her income to the retirees. Chart 5 shows how diverse the region is in this context, with some countries already facing serious challenges. In this chart, the horizontal axis is changes in working-age population, and the vertical axis is the proportion of the working-age population to the total population. A rise in this proportion is often called a “demographic bonus”, while the opposite is called a “demographic onus”. And the size of the bubble is proportional to the absolute number of the working-age population.

As you can see, over such a long period of time, even glacial demographic changes seem dramatic. Japan has already entered deep into the period of demographic onus, with the absolute number of the working-age population declining at a significant pace. The NIEs, China and some Asean countries are about to follow Japan in this regard in the not-so-distant future. Meanwhile, India and other Asian countries are expected to enjoy a favourable demographic environment at least until the middle of this century.

The third challenge is what I call the “Malthusian trap”. In Malthus’ original work, the existence of a limited resource – land in his case – constrains growth. Likewise, limitations in the supply of natural resources, such as oil, are thought to threaten global growth in the long run. A problem arises even with water, seemingly abundant resources at least for Japanese. As a matter of fact, water scarcity is often discussed as an important constraint on industrialisation as well as agricultural development in the global economy. From this point of view, the slowdown in commodity-consuming emerging economies in recent years may suggest that an automatic stabiliser – or an appropriate policy reaction toward this constraint is actually affecting the economic growth over the cycles. Environment issues such as global warming can be thought of as a variant of this Malthusian trap.

 

The second and concluding part of this speech, which Kuroda delivered for the Amartya Sen Lecture in Bangkok on Tuesday, will be published tomorrow.