Propriedade privada e a riqueza da China
A consultoria McKinsey, em sua tradicional publicação The McKinsey Quarterly trouxe um artigo interessante sobre uma das mais subestimadas fontes de riqueza da China: a propriedade privada. Essa posição coloca em xeque a atual tendência a considerar a China uma economia totalmente dependente do trabalho e da orientação do Estado.
Segue um trecho do texto, jutamente com o link para o artigo, disponível para download em formato pdf:
Although many experts contrast China’s grand infrastructure projects and gleaming factories built using foreign money with India’s dilapidated highways and paltry foreign-direct-investment flows, this point of view overstates the contribution of public spending and foreign investment to China’s growth. Neither of these forces assumed huge proportions in China until the late 1990s—long after relaxed financial controls and rural entrepreneurship prompted the initial growth surge, during the 1980s.
In that decade, China’s economy grew more rapidly than it did in the 1990s and brought better social outcomes: poverty declined, the gap between rich and poor narrowed, and labor’s share of GDP—a measure of the way average people benefit from economic growth—rose substantially. From 1978 to 1988, the number of rural people living below China’s poverty line fell by more than 150 million. In the 1990s, their number fell by only 60 million, despite almost double-digit increases in GDP growth and massive infrastructural construction. What’s more, in the 1980s China’s growth was driven far less than it is today by investments as opposed to consumption. In other words, entrepreneurial capitalism, unlike state-led capitalism, not only generated growth but also dispersed its benefits widely. Entrepreneurialism was virtuous as well as vibrant.
Big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are routinely extolled in the Western press as vibrant growth centers (exhibit). China’s rural areas, if mentioned at all, typically figure as impoverished backwaters. But a close analysis of the economic data reveals that these breathless descriptions of China’s modern city skylines have it exactly backward: in fact, the economy was most dynamic in rural China, while heavy-handed government intervention has stifled entrepreneurialism and ownership in the urban centers.
The McKinsey Quarterly – Private ownership: The real source of China’s economic miracle.pdf