在下目前急用一英文文章,看的云里雾里,题目都不太明白该怎么表述,前面那段凡伯伦的话更是不知所云,我试着就把引言部分翻了下,求教版上各位nb人士看看我翻的文章前面的大致内容,是不是理解的有偏差~有没有闹笑话,特别是对于一些专业术语?恳请帮我修改下译文,特别是标题和Veblen这段文字的斟酌,在下先谢过!!!

 

 

Convergence and Deferred Catch-up

  Productivity Leadership and the waning of American Exceptionalism

 

There are two lines of agency visibly at work shaping the habits of thought of [a] people in the complex movements of readjustment and rehabilitation [required by industrialization].These are the received scheme of use and wont and the new state of the industrial arts; and it is not difficult to see that it is the latter that makes for readjustment; nor should it be any more difficult to see that the readjustment is necessarily made under the surveillance of the received scheme of use and wont.

                                                       Thorstein Veblen,  1915

 

The comparative productivity experience of nations is commonly viewed as a race. But there is a difference between a runners’ race and a productivity race between nations. In a track race, if one runner gets off to a fast start, there is no reason why, on that account alone, her rivals should then be able to run faster than she. A productivity race is different: under certain conditions, being behind gives a productivity laggard the ability to grow faster than the early leader. That is the main contention of “convergence hypothesis”. The most striking example of the convergence to which this hypothesis refers was the experience since World War II, when America’s large lead eroded and the productivity levels of the other technologically advanced countries converged.

国家间的比较生产率通常被看成一种比赛.但是赛跑者之间的比赛和国家间关于生产率的比赛是有区别的.在常规径赛中,如果一个运动员起跑非常快,那么毫无理由,她的对手会比她跑的更快.而国家之间关于生产率的竞赛是不同的:在一定条件下,落后的国家有能力比先进者增长的更快.这就是融合假说的主要论点.这个假说提到融合的最醒目例子是从第二次世界大战以来的经验,即美国的巨大领导地位瓦解,而其他技术先进国家的生产率水平相融合.

The convergence hypothesis stands on four sturdy pillars---which in turn float on one large assumption. The assumption is that the countries in the productivity race differ only in their initial levels of productivity but are otherwise similar. The four legs are the four advantages in growth potential that a laggard nation enjoys just because it is behind. These are the pillars.

融合假说建立在四个坚实的支柱之上---反过来这些支柱又被一个大的假定所支撑。这个假定是说参与生产率竞争的各个国家只是在其生产率的初始水平上有所不同而在其他方面都是类似的.这四个支柱是推动落后国家因其落后而拥有的增长潜力的四大优势,具体罗列如下.

First, when a leader’s capital stock is replaced or expands, the improvement in technology embodied in the new plant and equipment is limited by such advances in the efficiency of capital goods as may have been made during the life of a representative asset. In a laggard country, however, the tangible capital is likely to be technologically obsolete. After all, that is one reason the laggard behind. When such equipment is replaced, the new equipment can embody state-of-the-art technology; so, on that account, the laggard can realize larger improvements in the average efficiency of its productive facilities than are available to the leader. An analogous argument applies to a laggard’s potential advance in the disembodied technology, that is, in the forms of industrial organization; routines of purchasing, production and merchandising; and managerial practice generally.

首先,当一个领导者的股本被替换或者扩张,体现(包含)在新的厂商和设备中的技术改进会被投资品效率的改善所限制,而这些效率的改善是在代表性资产的生命周期中形成的.然而,在一个落后的国家中,有形资产可能在技术上是过时的.这毕竟(终究)是其落后的一个原因.当这样的设备被更换为能体现最先进技术的新设备,那么落后国家在生产设备的平均效率上能实现比领导国家更大的改进.一个类似的争辩指出落后国家在未知技术上的潜在改进一般表现为以下几种形式:工业组织;购买、生产和销售常规;管理实践.

Second, laggard countries tend to suffer from low levels of capital per worker. That condition, especially in view of the chance to modernize capital stock, tends to make marginal returns to capital high and so to encourage rapid rates of capital accumulation.

第二,落后国家倾向于受低水平人均资本的困扰,这种情况下,特别是考虑到使股本现代化的机会,可以提高资本的边际报酬并刺激资本积累的高速增长.

Third, laggard countries often maintain relatively large numbers of redundant workers in farming and petty trade; so productivity growth can occur by shifting labor from farms to nonfarms jobs and from self-employment and family shops to larger-scale enterprises, even allowing for the cost of the additional capital that might be needed to maintain productivity levels in the new jobs.

第三,落后国家经常将相对大量的剩余劳动力置于农业和初级贸易产品的生产;因此,通过将劳动力从农业向非农行业的转移以及从自我雇佣和家庭小商店向大规模企业的转移会刺激生产率的增长,即便这样可能要承担额外的资本成本以维持新行业生产率水平.

Fourth, the relatively rapid growth from the first three sources makes for rapid growth in aggregate output and, therefore, in the scale of markets. This encourages the sort of technical progress which is dependent on large-scale production.

第四,由上述三点所引致的相对快速增长会使总产出迅速增长,进而市场规模也随之扩大.这将激励以大规模生产为基础的那类技术进步.

These, then, are the components of the convergence hypothesis in its elemental form. And if national characteristics were, indeed, to conform to the underlying assumption of similarity, we would expect that any national differences in the productivity levels which might appear would be eliminated sooner or later, because of the growth advantages inherent in being behind.

上述即是融合假说以要素形式所包括的组成部分.如果各国家的特征的确同内在的相似性假定相一致,我们预期可能出现的国家间生产率水平上的差异将迟早被消除,因为增长优势依附于后进国家.

The assumption of similarity calls for some explanation here. By it we mean, there are no persistent difference in national characteristics that would inhibit a laggard country from exploiting the advantages that being behind would otherwise present. In actual experience, productivity differences among countries stem from both persistent and transient causes. Persistent causes include poverty of natural resources; small scale of domestic markets, coupled with barriers to foreign trade; forms economic organization or systems of taxation that reduce the rewards for effort, enterprise or investment; or deeper elements of national culture that limit the responses of people to economic opportunities. Transient causes are occurrences like natural or military disasters, or dysfunctional forms of economic organization and public policy that may have ruled in the past but have been effectively reformed. The strength of the long-run tendency to convergence depends on a balance of forces: on one side, the advantages in growth potential that are inherent in being behind, and on the other hand, the limitations inherent in those persistent causes of backwardness that may originally have caused a country to become a productivity laggard. Therefore, in the limiting case envisaged by the model unconditional convergence, where differences in productivity levels arise solely from transient “shock”, productivity growth rates in any period would be found to vary inversely with their respective initial levels, so that laggards would tend to catch up with the leaders and differences in levels eventually would be eliminated. For a quarter-century following World War II, as was noted, the growth record of the presently advanced countries was strikingly consistent with this simple formulation of convergence hypothesis. But not all of the historical experience of economic growth, even for this same group of countries, fits the hypothesis. From 1870 to about 1950, America not only maintained, but actually widened its lead over other countries in terms of real GDP per capita and labor productivity. Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, had held the lead during the century before that, and the Netherlands did so at a still earlier time when it was a great mercantile power.

这里有必要给出关于相似性假定的一些解释说明.. 我们的意思是, 没有持续的国家或民族差异能阻止落后国家利用当前优势发展经济.在现实经验中,国家间生产率上的差异是由长期和短期的原因共同造成的. 长期原因包括自然资源的匮乏;国内市场狭小以及贸易壁垒;经济组织形式或税收制度降低了努力、企业和投资的回报;民族文化的深层因素制约了人们对经济机会的响应.而短期原因就像自然或军事灾难,或者象有运行障碍的经济组织和公共政策,其在过去居于统治地位而如今已被有效的改革.从长远看,促进融合的力量取决于两种势力的均衡:一方面,增长潜力中的优势依附于后进国家,另一方面,落后的长期原因中固有的局限会使一个国家从最初就陷入生产率低下的境地.………….国家倾向于追赶上领导者并且它们之间的差异将最终被消除.就像前面所提到的,自二战以来的四分之一个世纪, 目前先进国家的增长记录与融合假说的这种简单公式化理论高度一致。但并非所有经济增长的历史经验都和这个假说相吻合,即使对于同一组国家.从1870到1950年,美国在人均GDP和劳动生产率两方面不仅维持了、实际上还扩大了与其他国家相比的领先优势.而作为全世界最早的工业化国家----英国,在18到19世纪就保持了其领先地位,荷兰则依靠其强大的商业力量,在更早的时间就做到了这一点.

The insistent question, therefore, is how to reconcile the convergence hypothesis with the experience of persistent leadership. This involves asking what differences among countries impose limitations on the abilities of laggard countries to profit from the advantages of being backward. We must then ask how and why these limitations changed so as to become less constraining and thus led to the great boom in catch up and convergence that has marked the era since World War II.      

因此,迫切的问题是如何使得长期领先国家的经验与融合假说相一致.这就意味着要搞清楚国家之间的哪些差异制约了落后国家从其后发优势中获利的能力.我们还必须搞清楚这些制约因素怎样、以及为何发生了变化使得其约束能力减弱以至于引发了落后国家追赶和融合的巨大繁荣,标志着二战以来的新纪元.

To sharpen the focus of this inquiry, we confine ourselves to a comparison between the United States and a group of presently advanced capitalist countries since 1870. The group consists of 16 presently industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America together with Japan and Australia.(The list of countries appears in Table 1, below). They are the countries for which Angus Maddison has compiled estimates of manhour productivity rendered comparable over time by standard methods of price deflation and across countries by the purchasing-power-parity ratios prepared by Eurostat and the OECD. The next section reviews the broad features of the growth experience of these countries from 1870 to 1990. This is followed by a section in which we identify the kinds of factors other than a low productivity level that may give one or more countries an advantage in growth and, by the same token, operate as limitations on the ability of others to catch up. We then go on to sketch the particular forces that, during the last 120 years, first supported a strong America advantage and inhibited the forces of convergence, and later undermined the basis of that leadership advantage and lent impetus to the catch-up movement among the other industrially developed economics.

为抓住问题的本质,我们比较了自1870年以来美国和一组当前先进的资本主义国家的情况.其中包括了西欧、北美以及日本和澳大利亚等在内的16个目前工业化国家.（国家名录如下表1所示）.这些是经济史专家Angus Maddison…………..分回顾了这些国家从1870到1990年间经济增长经验的广泛特点.接下来,我们识别了增长因素的种类,除了可以给予一个或多个国家的增长优势的低水平生产率,同样的,…………..们概述了一股特殊的力量,在过去的120年里,这股力量首先支撑了强大的美国优势,阻止了融合的动力,接着暗中破坏了领先优势的基础,又推动了在其他发达工业国中的追赶潮流.

The nub of our argument is that in the closing decades of 19th century the U.S.economy had moved into the position of global productivity leadership, which was to hold for a remarkably long period thereafter, through a fortunate concordance between America’s own exceptional economic and social characteristics, and the nature of the dominant path of technological progress and labor productivity advances. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that path was natural resource-intensive, tangible-capital-using and scale-dependent in its elaboration of mass-production and high-throughput technologies and modes of business organization. Although this trajectory can be traced to back to technological and industrial initiatives in both Britain and the USA earlier in the 19th century, it found fullest development in the environment provided by North America continent. And so, during the course of the nineteenth century, it came to provide the USA with a strong productivity leadership advantage. This was so because the historical circumstances of contemporaneously developing economies, particularly those conditions affecting what we refer to as “technological congruence” and their “social capability”, imposed limitations on the abilities of the productivity laggards of western Europe and Japan derive a strong potential for rapid growth simply on the basis of being behind the USA.

我们讨论的要点是,在19世纪的最后几十年,美国经济已处于全球生产率领导者的位置,………世纪末到20世纪初的增长路径是密集使用自然资源、有形资本和对规模的高度依赖，具体体现在大规模生产、先进的生产技术和商业组织模式上.虽然这条路径可以追溯到19世纪初同时肇端于英国和美国的技术化和工业化,但其却在北美大陆提供的环境中得到了最充足的发展.在十九世纪,它使美国确立了其强大的生产率领导优势的地位.之所以如此是因为发展中经济具有同时性这一历史情况,尤其是那些条件影响了我们提到的技术一致性和社会功能,………

Yet America’s distinctive advantages did not retain their initially great importance throughout the first half of the present century. The advantage conferred by the USA’s rapid development of its rich endowment of mineral resources gradually dissipated, and some of the peculiar benefits that its industries derived from the larger scale and greater homogeneity of its domestic markets were eroded, partly by the growth of both domestic and foreign markets elsewhere, and partly by a gradual shift of the nature and direction of technological progress. In its global impacts the course of innovation became less biased towards the evermore intense application of tangible capital and natural resource inputs and, instead, came to favor greater emphasis on intangible capital formation through investments in education and R&D. For these and still other reasons, we contend that the waning of America exceptionalism, and the changing trajectory in the development of internationally available technology had the effect of reducing the comparative handicaps under which other countries seeking rapid productivity increases formerly were obliged to operate.

美国的显著优势并没有在20世纪上半期维持其最初的重要性.美国由于其丰富的矿物资源而支撑的快速经济发展优势逐渐消散,从其大范围且同质性的国内市场演化出的一些产业的特殊利润也被侵蚀,这样的后果部分是因为国内连同国外市场的繁荣,还因为技术进步的方向和性质的逐渐转变.在其全球冲击下,创新进程在持久密集使用有形资本和自然资源投入上变得有较小偏倚,反而通过投资教育和研发对无形资本的形成倾注了更多的关注.因为上述以及其他的原因,我们主张逐渐减少美国例外论,国际性可利用技术的发展变化轨迹有减少国家间比较差异的效果,在这种差异下,先前寻求快速生产率增长的其他国家被强制采取行动.

With the erosion of these American advantages, the ground was prepared for other countries with broadly similar economic and social institutions to participate in the interconnected processes of “catch-up investment” and “productivity convergence”. As we shall see, however, the realization by the laggards among the industrialized countries of that potentiality for differentially faster productivity growth, after having been deferred by the circumstances of the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, was fostered by a number of special conditions that obtained internationally during the postwar decades.

随着美国优势的瓦解,国际形势为其他国家准备以广泛相似的经济和社会体制参加到”追赶型投资”和”生产率融合”的互联过程.然而,正如我们将看到的,被工业化国家包围着的落后国的有区别的生产率快速增长的潜力的实现,在被二战和20上世纪30年代的大萧条所延迟后,在战后几十年被国际范围内一定数量的特殊条件所孵育.