对生活在欧元区的人来说，较为奇怪的经历之一是去德国超市购物。前几天，我有幸去了德国的超市，发现那里商品的价格普遍是比利时、意大利或西班牙商品价格的一半多点。当然，这只是一个不科学的推测。我还发现，在欧元区各个不同成员国的Ebay网站上，某些种类的商品售价相差达到30%左右。
这些差价一定程度上解释了欧元区各国不同的经济表现，并为未来的预期提供了指示。真正令人感兴趣的不是它们是如何产生的，而是它们为何没有自动消失。我们知道它们是如何产生的：德国以不具竞争力的汇率加入欧元区，并长期实行“工资节制”(wage moderation)政策。宏观经济学家会说，德国从本国对其它成员国的实际贬值中受益。但是，尽管实际汇率往往变动不定，但人们通常不会认为极端失调情况会保持很久。在这种情况下，人们会认为，西班牙和意大利的消费者将不会到本国昂贵的零售商店购物，而是登录德国网站进行邮购，尤其是购买耐用品。这最终将导致价格重新调整。
这种情形没有出现。
你还可能会预计，劳动力市场会面临一些重新调整压力。随着德国出口业完全恢复，人们会预计德国劳动力成本上涨的幅度应高于欧元区平均水平。
这种情形也没有发生。
需求面没有调整的原因在于，欧洲内部市场没有充分发挥作用——当然不是在消费层面上。我曾经与德国一家邮购公司的某高管交谈，问他为何比利时（我居住的国家）人买不了他们公司相当廉价的产品。他告诉我说，各国人的品味差异很大，因此他们无法在全欧洲提供邮购服务。我回答说，比利时人和意大利人可能与德国人一样，都喜欢便宜，只要有机会就可能会购买。尽管最近有所改善，但跨境购物仍困难得让人吃惊。
不完全单一市场阻碍产品方面的调整，市场完全缺乏一体化则阻碍劳动力市场方面的调整。你可能以为德国工人会想去国外工作，以谋求更高的工资，但这种情况并没有发生，因为欧洲劳动力市场仍然几乎是完全割裂的。这意味着德国的工资节制模式可以长期维持不变。德国的名义工资实际上被冻结，今后几年只会上调很少的百分点。
总之，这意味着欧元区内部的失衡不仅会持续，而且还可能加剧。这将使西班牙、葡萄牙或希腊更难着手进行经济调整。这些持续存在的失衡（远不是债务累积），是我担忧欧元区长期健康的深刻根源所在。
但是从德国的角度看，这种策略在短期内推动了增长。无疑，它是一种“以邻为壑”的策略。德国经济增长加快，不是受到生产扩大的推动，而是受到货币实际贬值的推动。
因此，尽管我预计德国经济的表现将高于欧元区平均水平，但重要的是要进行全面分析，不要从德国二季度9%的增长年率中得出错误的结论。如果你看一下自金融危机爆发以来的那段时期，就会发现德国经济一直表现不佳。如果你将危机以来德美两国的国内生产总值(GDP)加以比较，就会发现美国的表现要远远好于德国。如果美国陷入双底衰退，这种情况有可能会逆转。但目前我们能够做出的最佳判断，是法国财长克里斯蒂娜•拉加德(Christine Lagarde)最近接受英国《金融时报》采访时所说的话：德国今年复苏得更快，是因为去年它收缩得更快——GDP下降了5%。迄今为止，这看起来像是典型的“死猫诈尸”(dead-cat bounce)。
考虑到德国过于依赖出口，其经济表现最终将取决于全球经济走势。鉴于美国有二次衰退之势，很难想象德国如何能够保持其最近的增长率。要保持高增长率，德国需要国内需求骤然猛增。但我看不到这种需求将来自哪里。
要点在于，德国未来几年的经济表现几乎肯定高于欧元区平均水平，但当前的热情也过分夸大了。
对欧元区——最终也是对德国自身——来说，真正的危险，是货币实际贬值政策造成的束缚。我看不出南欧国家如何能够完全扭转实际汇率的失调，同时也没有任何迹象表明，欧洲产品及劳动力市场进行了充分改革，足以确保经济调整机制能够发挥作用。也就是说，德国经济的强劲或许会持续、有害，并且长远来看很有可能不利于自身。
译者/君悦
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001034393
One of the weirder experiences for anyone who lives in the eurozone is a visit to a German supermarket. I had the pleasure the other day, and found the general price level there to be a little over half of what it is in Belgium, Italy or Spain. This, of course, is just an unscientific guess. I also found price differences of some 30 per cent when comparing certain categories of goods on various Ebay sites in the eurozone.
These differences go some way to explaining the eurozone’s divergent economic performance, and give a pointer as to what to expect in the future. The really intriguing aspect of the divergences is not how they happened, but why they are not correcting themselves. We know how they happened: Germany entered the eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate and embarked on a long period of wage moderation. Macroeconomists would say Germany benefited from a real devaluation against other members. But while real exchange rates tend to move around, one would not normally expect extreme misalignments to be persistent. In this case, one would expect Spanish and Italian consumers to abandon their expensive retail stores and swamp German internet sites with mail order purchases, especially for durable goods. Eventually there would be some price realignment.
It is not happening.
You would also expect some pressure for realignment from the labour market. As the German export sector returns to full capacity, one would expect wage costs to rise by more than the eurozone average.
This is not happening either.
The reason for the lack of demand-side adjustment is that Europe’s internal market is not fully functioning, certainly not at the consumer level. I spoke to an executive of one of Germany’s mail order companies and asked him why people in Belgium, where I live, cannot buy his extremely cheap products. He told me that national tastes were so different as to preclude a European-wide mail order service. My response was that the Belgians, and the Italians, probably share the Germans’ taste for low prices, and would probably shop if only given an opportunity. Despite some recent improvements it remains surprisingly hard to shop cross-border.
While adjustment of the product side is prevented by an imperfect single market, adjustment on the labour market side is prevented by a complete absence of market integration. You would expect German workers to seek higher wages outside the country. But this is not happening, as the European labour market remains almost perfectly fragmented. That means German wage moderation can persist uncorrected for a long time. Nominal wages are effectively frozen, and are set to rise by only small percentages in the next few years.
Taken together, this means the intra-eurozone imbalances will not only persist, but probably increase. This will make the economic adjustment for Spain, Portugal or Greece even more difficult than it already is. Those persistent imbalances, much more than the build-up of debt, are my deep cause of concern about the long-term health of the eurozone.
But from a German perspective, this strategy boosts growth in the short term. It is, of course, a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy. The improvement in Germany’s economic growth is driven not by productivity gains but by real devaluation.
So while I expect the German economy to perform better than the eurozone average, it is important to keep some perspective and not draw false inferences from the 9 per cent annualised growth rate during the second quarter. If you look at the period since the beginning of the financial crisis, Germany’s economic performance has been dismal. If you compare levels of gross domestic product between Germany and the US since the crisis, you find the US significantly outperformed Germany during that period. That situation may still be reversed if the US were to go into a double-dip recession. But the best judgment we can make now is that of Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, in her recent interview in the Financial Times: Germany is recovering faster this year because it contracted faster last year, when GDP fell by 5 per cent. So far, this looks like classic dead-cat bounce.
Given its export-dependence, the performance of the German economy will ultimately depend on the global economy. As the US is heading for another downturn, it is hard to see how Germany can maintain its recent rates of growth. To do so would require a sudden increase in domestic demand. But I cannot see where that would come from.
The bottom line is that Germany’s economic performance will almost certainly improve relative to the eurozone average in the years ahead, but also that the current wave of enthusiasm is much exaggerated.
The real danger – to the eurozone, but ultimately to Germany itself – is the strains stemming from the policy of a real devaluation. I cannot see how southern Europe can ever fully reverse the misalignments in the real exchange rate. Nor are there any signs that the reforms in the EU’s product and labour markets will be sufficient to ensure that economic adjustment mechanisms can kick in. In other words, Germany’s economic strength is likely to be persistent, toxic and quite possibly self-defeating in the long-run.
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