揭开美国制造业复苏的假象

    “美国经济的三分之二属于非贸易性的，如果这部分经济停止运行，相关需求就会自动地由一位美国的供应商来满足，”阿特金森说。“如果一家理发店倒闭，我不会去加拿大理发。但当我们的贸易性部门破产、失去市场份额、规模缩减或者产能转移时，这份需求并不一定会由另一位美国供应商来填补。”

    阿特金森表示，由于担心制造业窘境更为真实的图景将诱发保护主义政策，经济学家们一直不太愿意直面数据问题。但他补充说：“应对这种困境的途径有多种，贸易保护主义仅仅只是其中的一种而已。”他的研究团队青睐一种更为积极主动、旨在恢复美国竞争力的战略，具体的措施包括：全面修订税收法规；投资公共和私营部门的合作项目，以发展高科技生产线等等。这项方案的具体细节将于今年春天晚些时候公布。

    译者：任文科

    "Two-thirds of our economy is non-traded, so if it goes out of business, the demand is automatically supplied by an American supplier," Atkinson says. "If a barbershop goes out of business, I'm not going to Canada to get a haircut. But when our traded sector goes out of business, or loses market share or cuts back or moves a factory, that demand is not necessarily replaced by American supply."

    Atkinson says economists have been slow to grapple with the data problem for fear that the truer picture of the sector's straits will encourage protectionists. But, he adds, "there are multiple paths one could go down as a response to this and that's only one of them." His group favors an aggressive strategy to restore U.S. competitiveness in part by overhauling the tax code and investing in public-private partnerships to develop higher-tech production lines -- an approach it will spell out in greater detail later this spring.