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又一篇关于innovation的。The "Trade War" is Really About the Future of Innovation
The escalation of tariffs between China and the United States is haunting the financial markets. “Manageable, orchestrated trade skirmishes” is probably the right description. But “trade war” is so much better a headline.
Either way, what is really going on is not about trade; it is about who will lead global innovation in the 21st century. Think less steel, soybeans, and solar panels, and more electric vehicles, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence.
The electoral incentives are clear for the Trump administration to talk up links between wages and jobs and the mushrooming of America’s trade deficit with China over the past 15 years.
But the administration’s much bigger concern is China’s very real challenge to American global dominance in the innovation economy. Rising power vs. incumbent power normally refers to the growing military competition between China and the U.S. But it also describes rising Sino-American competition over the future of innovation.
Consider some facts. China has laid down more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world combined (see the breathtaking new Chongqing-Guiyan line below). Mobile payments in China are 50 times as large as in the U.S. Last year, more electric vehicles were sold in China than in the rest of the world, and more than twice as many industrial robots were in use in China than in the U.S.
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are firmly entrenched in the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization. They were joined a couple of years ago by two Chinese companies—Alibaba and Tencent—that continued to climb up the standings.
Over the period 2012-2016, Goldman Sachs estimates that total AI investment in the U.S. were about $18 billion, compared with only $2 billion in China—big advantage to America. But by 2020 China intends to invest about $150 billion in AI—looming enormous advantage to China.
There is no doubt that most of the best new underlying technology continues to come out of the U.S. Realistically, it will take China many years, probably decades, to change this.
But the ability of China to adopt and adapt American technology, and to do so at warp speed and massive scale, is extraordinary. If the definition of innovation is turning ideas into outcomes, China is already an innovation economy.
This is what the Trump administration is really worried about. Dig just below the surface of “trade war” tweets, and the administration’s focus on China and the future of innovation is apparent.
The U.S. Trade Representative report on which the new tariffs are based is entitled, “China’s acts, policies, and practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation.” Nothing about steel or manufacturing jobs.
This report then justifies actions against China based on a powerful but controversial provision of Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, which allows the President to take essentially any actions he sees fit against “acts, policies or practices that are unreasonable or discriminatory and that burden or restrict U.S. Commerce.”
This raises three big questions:
1. Is China behaving “unreasonably” to restrict U.S. commerce with respect to the innovation economy?
There is no doubt that the Chinese government has an active “industrial policy” to transform its economy from a low cost assembler and manufacturer into a global leader in the cutting edge industries of the 21st century. This is the core of Xi Jinping’s ambition for China.
In the past, the U.S. government has complained that government investment creates “unfair competition” in global markets—for example, the muscle European governments have used to help Airbus take on Boeing. But that is not the U.S.’s main beef with China.
Instead, the U.S. is arguing that China unfairly regulates the conditions under which American firms can operate in China—with good reason. There is no doubt that the Chinese government regulates what American firms do in China, with a view both to protecting domestic firms and to ensuring that Chinese companies get access to leading-edge American intellectual property.
My economics training tells me it does not matter “who wins” in innovation, because the whole world will benefit from more innovation no matter where it comes from.
Consider, for example, the 15-year-old joint venture between General Motors and Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corporation that has resulted in GM’s selling more vehicles today in China than it does in America. This has been great for GM’s bottom line. But it has also increased the probability that China will soon have its own global auto company (not necessarily SAIC) that will compete head-to-head with GM inside and outside China. All the more likely given China’s enormous investments in electric and self-driving vehicles.
Would American firms like to have unfettered access to the Chinese market? Would they prefer not to have to enter joint ventures with Chinese firms? Are they worried that “tech transfer” in China sometimes takes the form of intellectual property theft?
Yes, to all three questions. This is just not the way the free market is supposed to operate. But the Chinese government says it has the right to regulate its own market, and it is improving intellectual property protections all the time. That is why China says what the U.S. is doing is unfair, and why its own retaliation is justified, focusing on industries like farming that might hurt Trump’s Republicans at the ballot box in November.
2. Is the U.S. justified in retaliating with trade sanctions against China?
The Chinese government says “no.” So, too, might the World Trade Organization, which has repeatedly questioned the legality of Section 301 because it makes the U.S. judge and jury in its disputes with other countries—when this is exactly the job the WTO was created to do.
Even though the U.S. was the prime mover behind the creation of the WTO, it has always wanted to insist that it is above the international law, at least with respect to the powers it gave itself in the 1974 Trade Act, two decades before the creation of the WTO. All the more so in Trump’s America.
This rules out at least two pathways to resolving the current dispute between China and the U.S. The U.S. will defend its right to act under Section 301. China will not appeal to the WTO to rule against the U.S. Instead, both countries will take matters into their own hands—that is exactly what has happened this year.
3. Where will it end?
In the past, I have argued that it is best to view things like trade spats between China and the U.S. as well-choreographed theater designed to appease domestic political audiences without threatening the underlying big economic win-wins between the two countries. It is easy to fit “steel for soybeans” tit-for-tat tariffs into that frame.
But the stakes are much higher where the future of innovation is concerned. My economics training tells me it does not matter “who wins” in innovation, because the whole world will benefit from more innovation no matter where it comes from. Moreover, it is clear that the U.S. and China are complementary where innovation is concerned—the U.S. has a comparative advantage in incubating innovation; China’s comparative advantage is scaling it. This makes cooperation so much better than conflict.
The problem with this thinking in the current situation is that the economic competition bleeds quickly over into concerns about military/security competition—and the rising power (China) vs incumbent power (U.S.) dynamic more generally. Cyber security is an obvious example. The same technologies that make industrial espionage possible and increase worries about personal data security are also increasingly the backbone of the 21st century military. In fact, most modern technology falls under the “dual use” rubric—important both to commerce and to security.
Put it all together, and China-U.S. competition over innovation is here to stay. I do not expect the current trade tensions to spiral out of control—the potential for major damage to the economies of both countries, and to the global economy, is just too great. But even if Trump and Xi continue to emulate their predecessors in managing down their tensions, the underlying struggle over who will win the battle for global pre-eminence in innovation will only intensify. Calling it a trade war is not only misleading. It is also an understatement of what is really going on between the two most powerful countries in the world.
Geoffrey Garrett is Dean, Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise, and Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Follow Geoff on Twitter.
America Is Losing Its Edge for Startups
It used to be that 95 percent of global startup and venture-capital activity happened in the U.S. Today, it’s just over one-half.
Lately, there’s been talk of a shift in innovation and high-tech startups from expensive, increasingly unaffordable hubs like Silicon Valley to more affordable, up-and-coming locales such as Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Nashville. I’m all for it: Having spent nearly two decades in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University, I have long been a fan of the incredible innovation capacity and entrepreneurial potential of that great city.
But according to new data I analyzed with my colleague and collaborator Ian Hathaway (a leading expert in entrepreneurship and venture capital), the more troubling reality for the United States is that an even bigger “rise of the rest” is occurring in cities in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Our report released on Friday compiles the most detailed data yet on global startup cities, tracking venture-capital investment in nations and cities around the world. Using data from PitchBook, a leading source of information on venture-capital investment, it tracks that investment in more than 100,000 startup companies in 300-plus global cities over the period 2005 to 2017.
Up until very recently, the U.S. was far and away the dominant player in high technology backed by venture capital. Game-changing companies like Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Genentech, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork are just a few well-known examples of venture-backed companies that have introduced new technologies and spurred the rise of whole new industries.
But America’s long-standing lead in VC-backed high tech is now in jeopardy, according to our analysis. About two-and-a-half decades ago, the U.S. was home to more than 95 percent of global startup and venture-capital activity. Today, that share has been cut to a little more than one-half. And the pace of that decline is accelerating, with more than half of the fall occurring in just the past five years.
Analysis of PitchBook and VentureSource data. (Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway)
Analysis of PitchBook data. Note: Values are the country share of global activity spanning each of the three-year periods. (Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway)
While it is true that venture-capital investment in the U.S. continues to rise, having reached more than $90 billion in 2017, such investment is growing even faster in other parts of the world, expanding by nearly 375 percent—more than twice the 160-percent increase here. China saw the largest jump, its share expanding from 4 percent of global venture investment in 2005 to a nearly a quarter of it by 2017. But it’s more than China. Nations including India, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Israel, and Canada have all seen substantial increases in venture-capital investment in their startup companies.
Analysis of PitchBook data. Note: Values are the levels of activity (in $ millions) spanning the three-year period 2015-17. (Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway)
Analysis of PitchBook data. Note: Values are the percentage contribution to global change between the three-year periods 2010-12 and 2015-17. (Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway)
When it comes to high-tech innovation and startups, the real action happens in tight clusters of activity within cities and urban centers. And here, the relative decline of the U.S. and the rise of the global rest is, if anything, even more palpable. The San Francisco Bay Area remains the world’s leading startup city, with roughly 20 percent of global VC investment. But a growing number of global cities are gaining ground, and quickly.
Analysis of PitchBook data. Note: Values are the percentage change between the three-year periods 2010-12 and 2015-17. (Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway)
Beijing and London have joined the Bay Area, New York, and Los Angeles in the club of what Hathaway and I term Superstar startup cities. In our second tier, Elite hubs, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm join Austin, Seattle, San Diego, and Chicago. And in the third tier, Advanced global startup cities, Toronto, Sydney, Dublin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong join Raleigh-Durham, Miami, Denver, and D.C.
Of America’s rise-of-the-rest cities, only two or three—Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Minneapolis—make the list of the world’s 60 or so established startup cities. The majority of them, such as Nashville, Detroit, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Cincinnati, are part of a separate group of 40 or so emerging tech hubs, alongside smaller U.S. college towns like Ann Arbor, Madison, and Bozeman, and rapidly growing Asian hubs like Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Calcutta, and Manila.
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