Myth of the New Economy 新经济神话

　　付美榕 编译

　　20世纪90年代，当日本和欧盟各国经济陷于低速增长、萎靡不振的困境之时，美国却风景这边独好，进入健康运行、突飞猛进的经济发展阶段，创造了低通胀、低失业、高增长率的“新经济”神话，率先从工业时代进入信息与知识经济时代的新纪元。一方面，80年代以来政府大力鼓励高新技术产业的发展，这使美国经济和社会等诸多方面发生了重大而深刻的变化。另一方面，克林顿总统八年任职期间的经济政策也功不可没。从削减赤字措施到国家出口战略，从信息高速公路计划到教育目标法案，这一切大刀阔斧的新自由主义改革行动卓有成效，带来了美国经济的长久繁荣，也为“美国世纪”划上了一个圆满的句号。

　　A recession marked the early years of Reagan's presidency, but conditions started to improve in 1983 and the United States entered one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth since World War II. However, an alarming percentage of this growth was based on deficit spending1. In 1988, former vice president George Bush became President. He continued many of Reagan's policies. Bush's efforts to gain control over the federal budget deficit, however, were problematic.2 The 1990s brought a new president, Bill Clinton3, a cautious, moderate Democrat, whose liberal initiatives created a myth for the American economy.

　　Clinton sounded some of the same themes as his predecessors. After unsuccessfully urging Congress to enact an ambitious proposal to expand health-insurance coverage,4 Clinton declared that the era of "big government" was over in America. He pushed to strengthen market forces in some sectors, working with Congress to open local telephone service to competition.5 He also joined Republicans to reduce welfare benefits. Still, although Clinton reduced the size of the federal work force, the government continued to play a crucial role in the nation's economy. Most of the major innovations of the New Deal, and a good many of the Great Society, remained in place. And the Federal Reserve system continued to regulate the overall pace of economic activity, with a watchful eye for any signs of renewed inflation.

　　The economy, meanwhile, turned in an increasingly healthy performance as the 1990s progressed. With the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism in the late 1980s, trade opportunities expanded greatly.6 Technological developments brought a wide range of sophisticated new electronic products. Innovations in telecommunications and computer networking spawned a vast computer hardware and software industry and revolutionized the way many industries operate.

　　Best of all, the healthy economy has transformed the psyche of millions of Americans. The pervasive gloom at the beginning of the 1990s is gone.7 No longer are Americans afraid that the Japanese will overwhelm them with superior technology or that they will saddle their children with government debt.

　　America's labor force changed markedly during the 1990s. Continuing a long-term trend, the number of farmers declined. A small portion of workers had jobs in industry, while a much greater share worked in the service sector, in jobs ranging from store clerks to financial planners. If steel and shoes were no longer American manufacturing mainstays, computers and the software that make them run were.

　　The expansion that began in March 1991 has raised real gross domestic product by more than a third, minted 100,000 more people earning a million dollars a year. After peaking at $290,000 million in 1992, the federal budget deficit steadily shrank as economic growth increased tax revenues. In 1998, the government posted its first surplus in 30 years, although a huge debt ?mainly in the form of promised future Social Security payments to the baby boomers ?remained. Economists, surprised at the combination of rapid growth and continued low inflation, debated whether the United States had a "new economy" capable of sustaining a faster growth rate than seemed possible based on the experiences of the previous 40 years.8

　　Finally, the American economy was more closely intertwined with the global economy than it ever had been. Clinton, like his predecessors, had continued to push for elimination of trade barriers. A North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)9 had further increased economic ties between the United States and its largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico. Asia, which had grown especially rapidly during the 1980s, joined Europe as a major supplier of finished goods and a market for American exports. Sophisticated worldwide telecommunications systems linked the world's financial markets in a way unimaginable even a few years earlier.

　　While many Americans remained convinced that global economic integration benefited all nations, the growing interdependence created some dislocations as well. Workers in high-technology industries ?at which the United States excelled ?fared rather well, but competition from many foreign countries that generally had lower labor costs tended to dampen wages in traditional manufacturing industries. Then, when the economies of Japan and other newly industrialized countries in Asia faltered in the late 1990s10, shock waves rippled throughout the global financial system. American economic policy-makers found they increasingly had to weigh global economic conditions in charting a course for the domestic economy.

　　Still, Americans ended the 1990s with a restored sense of confidence. By the end of 1999, the economy had grown continuously since March 1991, the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. Unemployment totaled just 4.1 percent of the labor force in November 1999, the lowest rate in nearly 30 years. And consumer prices11, which rose just 1.6 percent in 1998 (the smallest increase except for one year since 1964), climbed only somewhat faster in 1999 (2.4 percent through October). Many challenges lay ahead, but the nation had weathered the 20th century ?and the enormous changes it brought ?in good shape.

　　In his last State of the Union Address12 in January 2000, President Clinton outlined the progress that had been made in the 1990s: "We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs; the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years; the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years; the lowest poverty rates in 20 years; the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record; the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years. And next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic growth in our entire history."