Growth through Innovation An Industrial Strategy for Shanghai By Shahid Yusuf Kaoru Nabeshima April 22nd, 2009
II. Five Stylized Tendencies and their Implications
Download 0.88 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- A Services Economy Is A Mixed Blessing
- Productivity Growth Favors Manufacturing
- Innovativeness Is Greatest in Research Intensive Activities
- Monosectoral Urban Economies Tend to Be Unequal
II. Five Stylized Tendencies and their ImplicationsThe experience of these four cities and of other cities in industrialized countries yield five stylized tendencies of relevance for Shanghai as it maps a future strategy. Agglomeration Economies Bring Many BenefitsSize and industrial heterogeneity can deliver scale and urbanization economies, permitting gains in productivity and innovation which contribute to the competitiveness of existing industries and also to the emergence of new activities. In principle, heterogeneity enlarges the options for a city to diversify, and a sizable concentration of relatively affluent and discriminating consumers and businesses demanding innovation makes it easier to introduce new products and new lines of business.90 The potential for co-creating valuable innovations with customers is also greater in cities (Prahalad and Krishnan 2008). The productivity gains arising from agglomeration and scale economies are a consequence of a greater circulation of inter-industry information, ‘thicker’ labor markets, superior access to specialized services, as well as to better public infrastructure and to public facilities (Melo, Graham and Noland 2009). A review of research findings shows that the productivity advantages conferred by size and urbanization economies range from 3 percent to 14 percent of GDP (Rosenthal and Strange 2004).91 Large cities that are absorbing young migrants and where many newcomers are educated and skilled, benefit from their energy, entrepreneurship and human capital (D. E. Bloom and Williamson 1998; Parker 2007).92 A growing population, many with skills that deepen the urban labor pool, can add one to two percent to economic growth if it also crowds in more capital into local productive activities through new starts which can spawn new industrial clusters,93 for example (E. L. Glaeser and Kerr 2008).94 A Services Economy Is A Mixed BlessingLeading cities emerged as centers of industry or as administrative and logistics hubs – often all three – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.95 Frequently manufacturing was the engine of growth with services playing a secondary role even when services generated a majority of the jobs. Mainly because of historical circumstances and location, a few of the very largest, strategically located cities diversified into financial and business services which initially served regional or colonial markets and later, global markets. Financial globalization expedited by the progressive dismantling of capital and exchange controls and the parallel partial deregulation of the financial sector has enabled the early starters, in particular London and New York, to rapidly expand the scale of their financial activities using a variety of instruments, and to widen their international reach (Eichengreen and Leblang 2008; Obstfeld and Taylor 2003). The growth of finance and associated business services provided a new growth engine for the global cities and to some lesser ones as well and hastened the exodus of manufacturing. Finance can become the foremost leading sector when a city begins serving a large regional or a global market. In other words, the push exerted by the expansion of increasingly highly paid services employment especially in finance, and the activities of urban developers catering to these services, can reinforce the pull exerted by other lower cost locations on manufacturing, resulting in a rapid shrinkage of manufacturing industry. The consequence is an increasingly mono-industrial economy dominated by a few business services and retail and personal services; and declining industrial heterogeneity and layering which was once the strength of the leading financial centers. The remaining and significantly attenuated urbanization economies arise from the diversity of services activities. Most industrial cities are unable to make a transition to global cities led by finance and other business services.96 Once manufacturing fades away, these cities cannot sustain earlier levels of prosperity on the back of the services that remain or on new services attracted to these cities most of which have a local clientele (or at best a regional) and rarely tap into the global market. The result can be a vicious downward spiral. As the economic and revenue bases narrow, industrial diversity is reduced, the supply of skilled workers becomes smaller as the most talented migrate, and the chances of a revival diminish. Even a large injection of capital from central or sub-national governments is unable to jumpstart these municipal cities once industry has been denuded, labor and entrepreneurs have departed and the industrial fabric has developed large holes. Productivity Growth Favors ManufacturingHistorical experience shows that productivity has grown fastest in manufacturing activities. Hence the diminishing share of manufacturing in GDP eats into the contribution of productivity to growth. With national and urban economies in industrialized countries drawing more of their growth impetus from productivity, the changing composition of economic activities – which has been labeled Baumol’s Disease – means a trend reduction in growth as there is little evidence that most services can generate rates of productivity increase comparable to those of manufacturing industries.97 Table 4 .17 shows the effect of changing GDP composition on TFP growth in the United States. Had the GDP composition remained fixed at the proportion reached in 1948, the annual TFP growth in the United States would have been 1.49 percent. The GDP composition as of 2001 results in an annual rate of TFP growth of 0.85 percent. Thus, changes in the composition of GDP between 1948 and 2001 are responsible for a reduction of 0.64 percentage point of TFP growth per annum. The shift to services can, therefore, be doubly disadvantageous. Aside from constraining urbanization economies and the scope for diversification, mono-sectoral urban economies, even very large ones, risk sacrificing growth over the long run. Table 4.17: Fixed-shares growth rate for total factor productivity for different periods
Source: Nordhaus (2008) Innovativeness Is Greatest in Research Intensive ActivitiesTotal factor productivity and growth are intertwined with innovation. Large urban centers are on balance more innovative.98 But the level of innovation and its commercial outcomes are also a function of industrial composition. Some kinds of activities are more research intensive and innovative. It is not only R&D that leads to innovation, however, there is a robust relationship running from R&D to patents, and publications which are widely viewed as proxies for innovation (Griliches 2000; B. Hall and Mairesse 2006; Jaffe 1986; Wieser 2005). Manufacturing industries, especially the high tech ones engage in more R&D and produce many more patents than services activities. If patents signal innovation, then manufacturing is more likely to spawn subfields and new starts, which can widen existing markets or give rise to new markets; and introduce process innovations which are widespread in manufacturing and have a higher probability of promoting productivity. Monosectoral Urban Economies Tend to Be UnequalLarge cities that transition rapidly from an economy based on manufacturing to one whose center of gravity lies in services, face the challenge of finding alternative employment opportunities for workers and of sustaining an urban middle class. The experience of New York, London, Singapore and Hong Kong suggests that services industries do not on the average generate as many additional jobs or jobs that pay as well as the manufacturing activities they replace (Sassen 1991). Some services such as finance, legal and accounting do create well paid jobs but only for highly educated workers and not for ex-factory hands. Retraining middle aged factory workers has been a failure wherever it has been tried and many factory workers can end up being permanently unemployed as has happened across Europe. The result is rising inequality and a shrinking middle class.99 Too much of the city’s income derives from a few activities and it can become concentrated in the hands of few, generally mobile workers.100 Such a distribution of incomes affects real estate values, drives the lower and middle income workers away from the core areas of the city, and unravels communities and neighborhoods that saps the vitality of a city, and affects the urban quality of life by leading to a homogenization of neighborhoods as well as a diminishing diversity of people and of activities in the core city areas (see Table 4 .18).101 These stylized tendencies can inform development policies in Shanghai. However, as we noted earlier, times have changed as have industrial lifecycles. Shanghai is quite unlike New York in the earlier decades of the twentieth century and its opportunity set and constraints also differ a great deal. How it could evolve will depend on a variety of factors which are discussed in the remainder of this volume. Table 4.18: Gini Coefficients in Selected Cities
Note: New York data from 2007 American Community Survey Source: UN-HABITAT 2008 Directory: curated curated -> Concept stage curated -> Concept stage curated -> Republic of Côte d'Ivoire Urbanization Review curated -> Report No: aus11011 Central America curated -> Report No. 94474-pk fiscal Disaster Risk Assessment Options for Consideration curated -> Environmental and Social Management Framework for the Costa Rica Telecommunications Sector Modernization Project curated -> Environment Impact Assessment For Jiangxi Shangrao Sanqingshan Airport Beijing Guohuantiandi Environmental Technology Development Center. Ltd. Oct. 2012 Content curated -> Report No: 70178. People's Republic of China curated -> Making Nutrition Policy Central to Development Understanding the Political and Institutional Conditions for Policy Change Case Study of the Political Economy of Nutrition Policies in Ethiopia Prepared By Download 0.88 Mb. Share with your friends:
|