Ideology and National Competitiveness

摘要

The ability of a nation to compete effectively in the world economy depends to a great extent on its prevailing ideology. Briefly put, my argument is: First, there is such a thing as a competitive nation; Second, in this clay and age, ideology is perhaps a nation's most important competitive advantage; and Third, a communitarian ideology is and will be more competitive than an individualistic one that ideology gives high priority to competitiveness; if it is flexible, capable of adapting and adjusting to the exigencies of the real world; and if institutions such as government and business are efficiently aligned with it. This argument rests on conceptions of the roles and relationships of government and business which are quite contrary to the beliefs of traditional economists, such as those who currently advise the President of the United States. For them, there is no such thing as a competitive nation; nations do not compete. Firms compete against firms with governments standing on the sidelines, blowing the whistle now and then, but never acting as players, certainly not as a coach. And for the traditionalists, everyone is better off if this competition occurs in a world characterized by free trade, free markets, and flee enterprise; firms benefiting from what the economists call the comparative advantage of their home base; comparative advantage meaning essentially that with which God has endowed the nation. Textbooks repeat the famous example of David Ricardo. Portugal, endowed with sunshine, was supposed to grow grapes and make wine. Britain, endowed by God with nobody knows quite what, was supposed to make sheep, which in turn made wool, which was to be converted into textiles. And, so said Ricardo, in the best of all possible worlds, it was Portuguese wine for British textiles. Needless to say, Ricardo was English, not Portuguese. And, at the time in which he wrote, textiles was the high value-added, high-income, high-profit, high-wage industry, comparable to semiconductors and computers today (Scott, 1984). Many of America's competitors have shown this theory to be wrong. You can live on a rock in the fog and be fiercely competitive if as a nation you have the will, the purpose, the discipline, the consensus, the coherence, and the theory. And how do you measure a nation's competitiveness? You look at its share of world markets, its share of world gross national product, and its ability to earn--not borrow--a rising standard of living for its people. Since a rising living standard means higher wages and less pollution, competitiveness requires that a country move up the ladder of technology, gaining share in the high value-added sectors of tomorrow. This is the story of Korea, Japan, and Singapore, among other countries. Japan in the early 1960s had essentially no computer industry. Traditional theory would have said that Japan should buy computers from the United States and make the most of its cheap labor force. Japan said no; that is the way to stagnation. We will protect our home market and concentrate our resources to achieve competitiveness, with government and business acting in concert to promote the national goal of global competitiveness. The same theory and practice was of course applied to many other sectors-machine tools, robotics, semiconductors--and it is being applied today to biotechnology, superconductivity, advanced materials, telecommunications, and more. The fact is, as my colleague Bruce Scott has demonstrated, that nations have strategies; and competitive nations have strategies that make them competitive. These strategies are characterized by high savings and high investment with low capital costs in selected industries, which are chosen by government and business as targets for national endeavor. The strategies are backed by a strong consensus among the people and between managers and managed, and they are complimented by trade policies which provide encouragement to the designated winners but