每天一篇经济学人 | Britain's economy 英国经济（2022年第
Manchester has plenty of swagger. It has the best team in club football, and is also home to Manchester United. Cranes dot the city centre. Its mayor, Andy Burnham, is the most recognised in the country, beating his counterparts in London and the West Midlands. Yet the cockiness disguises a big problem, for the city and for Britain. The Manchester urban area contains 3.4m people, making it about as populous as Amsterdam, Hamburg and San Diego. But its gdp per head at purchasing-power parity is at least a quarter lower than all three, and stuck at about 90% of the average in Britain itself.
曼彻斯特有足够的狂妄。它拥有最好的足球俱乐部，也是曼联的大本营。起重机散布在市中心。它的市长安迪·伯纳姆击败了伦敦和西米德兰兹郡的市长，是全国知名度最高的市长。然而，这种狂妄掩盖了一个大问题，对这座城市和整个英国都是如此。曼彻斯特市区人口340万，与阿姆斯特丹、汉堡和圣地亚哥的人口相当。但按购买力平价计算，英国的人均GDP至少比上述三国低四分之一，而且停留在英国平均水平的90%左右。
As with Manchester, so with Tyneside, Birmingham and other conurbations in the Midlands and north of England. Second-tier cities in most countries have productivity that matches or exceeds the national average; a pre-pandemic analysis by the oecd of 11 British second-tier cities, mostly in the north of England, found that gross value-added per worker was 86% of the British average. London is as rich as Paris, but metropolitan Birmingham or Leeds is nowhere near as rich as Lyon or Toulouse.
与曼彻斯特一样，泰恩赛德、伯明翰和英格兰中部和北部的其他城市也是如此。大多数国家的二线城市的生产率与全国平均水平相当或超过全国平均水平; 经合组织在疫情爆发前对英国11个二线城市(主要位于英格兰北部)进行了分析，发现这些城市的人均总附加值是英国平均水平的86%。伦敦和巴黎一样富裕，但大都市伯明翰或利兹远不及里昂或图卢兹富裕。
No one should be happy about this lopsided picture, whether proud northerner or smug southerner. The country’s long-running growth problem cannot be solved—more to the point, has not been solved—by one superstar metropolis.
无论是骄傲的北方人还是自鸣得意的南方人，都不应该为这种不平衡的局面感到高兴。一个超级明星大都市不可能(更确切地说，还没有)解决这个国家长期存在的经济增长问题。
These huge imbalances in Britain’s economic geography have not gone unnoticed. In the 2010s George Osborne, then chancellor of the exchequer, promoted the idea of a northern powerhouse. Boris Johnson put promises to tackle regional inequality at the heart of his 2019 election campaign. Gordon Brown, a former Labour prime minister, highlighted the problem in a set of proposals for constitutional reform this week (even if proposals to remake Parliament hogged all the attention). But diagnosis is plainly not the same as cure.
英国经济地理上的这些巨大失衡并没有被忽视。在2010年代，时任财政大臣乔治•奥斯本提出了“北部振兴计划”。鲍里斯·约翰逊将解决地区不平等问题作为2019年竞选活动的核心。前工党首相戈登•布朗本周在一系列宪法改革提案中强调了这一问题(尽管重塑议会的提案占据了所有注意力)。但诊断显然不等同于治疗。
It is true that Britain’s second-tier cities face some deep-rooted challenges. Manchester and other post-industrial spots share several ailments—poor health, labour-force scarring, too few people and jobs in their centres. But they could achieve so much more if politicians got a few relatively simple things right.
的确，英国二线城市面临着一些根深蒂固的挑战。曼彻斯特和其他后工业时代的城市都有一些共同的弊病——健康状况不佳，劳动力“伤痕累累”，人口太少，就业机会太少。但是，如果政客们做对了一些相对简单的事情，他们可以取得更多的成就。
One is to focus on big conurbations, not towns. Some politicians persist in thinking that smaller places need lots of attention. Mr Johnson’s “levelling-up” agenda included a multi-billion-pound Towns Fund; Treasury workers are being moved to Darlington, a place with 108,000 people in north-eastern England that happens to be next to the constituency of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister. Invigorating metropolises has a far bigger impact; Greater Manchester is home to almost one in five people living in the north of England. And successful conurbations pull surrounding towns up. Britain needs several engines to fire, but they have to be big.
一是把重点放在大城市，而不是城镇。一些政客坚持认为小地方需要更多的关注。约翰逊的“振兴”议程包括数十亿英镑的城镇基金;财政部的工作人员正被转移到达林顿，这个拥有10.8万人口的英格兰东北部城市，且恰好毗邻首相里希•苏纳克的选区。振兴大都市的影响要大得多; 大曼彻斯特居住着英格兰北部近五分之一的人口。成功的城市将带动了周边城镇的发展。英国需要几个引擎来发动，但必须是大引擎。
A second priority is to rebalance public investment away from London. Between 2000 and 2019, the government devoted £10,000 ($12,160) per Londoner to economic development, science and technology, and transport. The equivalent figure for residents in the north-east and north-west hovered at around £5,000. There is a rationale for this: productive places generate higher returns on investment. But it is a recipe for entrenching the skew between the capital and the rest. And the Treasury has approved southern schemes, such as upgrading London’sThameslink railway, with low benefit-cost ratios.
第二个优先事项是重新平衡公共投资，减少对伦敦的投资。从2000年到2019年，政府为每个伦敦人投入了1万英镑(合12,160美元)用于经济发展、科学技术和交通。东北部和西北部居民的相应数字徘徊在5000英镑左右。这是有理由的: 生产效率高的地方会产生更高的投资回报。但这种方法会加深首都和其他地区之间的差距。财政部已经批准了一些南部计划，比如升级伦敦的泰晤士河铁路，这些计划的效益成本比很低。
The third and most important priority is to devolve fiscal control. Cities must go cap in hand to Whitehall for much of their money. Only 6% of tax revenue in Britain is collected by local government, a large chunk of it for social care. That is a tiny share in comparison with others. Combine local and regional taxes, and France is on 14%, Germany 32% and America 36%.
第三个也是最重要的优先事项是下放财政控制权。各城市必须毕恭毕敬地向白厅申请大笔资金。在英国，只有6%的税收收入是由地方政府征收的，其中很大一部分用于社会福利。与其他国家相比，这只是一个很小的份额。加上地方税和地区税，法国为14%，德国为32%，美国为36%。
Worse, much of the money available to cities is in the form of pots for which they are invited to bid. These pots are numerous and often piddling. Civil servants sit in Whitehall, weighing applications for cash to run adult-numeracy programmes and to build public toilets hundreds of miles away. Officials in Greater Manchester are currently handling more than 110 grants from 15 government departments. The result is colossal inefficiency, especially when policies change—as they do, a lot. Officials wasted many hours this year preparing bids for investment zones, a wheeze of Liz Truss’s brief administration.
更糟糕的是，城市所能得到的大部分资金都是以招标的形式存在的。这些招标数量众多，而且资金往往少得可怜。公务员们坐在白厅，权衡申请资金来开展成人算术项目，以及在数百英里外修建公厕的问题。大曼彻斯特的官员们目前正在处理来自15个政府部门的110多笔赠款。其结果是效率极低，尤其是当政策发生很大变化时。今年，官员们浪费了很多时间准备投资区域的竞标，这是利兹·特拉斯短暂执政期间的一个喘息。
This system also distorts decision-making. Cities define their needs in order to fit available grants. When there is money for sprucing up high streets, cities decide they must do that; when there is money for buses, everyone develops a bus obsession. Ministers in London may be tempted to dole out largesse for political ends. A report in 2020 by the Public Accounts Committee, a parliamentary body, was suspicious of how recipients of levelling-up grants were chosen; one town that got money was 535th out of 541 in the priority list.
这种制度也扭曲了决策。各城市定义它们的需求，以适应可用的补助金。当有用于装修商业街的资金时，城市必须这么做; 当出资用于公共汽车时，每个人都会执着于公共汽车。伦敦的部长们可能会出于政治目的而慷慨解囊。议会机构公共账目委员会在2020年的一份报告中对“振兴”补助金的受助人的选择方式表示怀疑;一个获得资金的城镇在541个优先名单中排名第535位。
Mr Brown has some good ideas for tackling these problems, such as consolidating funding streams from Whitehall. But neither Labour nor the Tories have embraced the obvious prescription: give metropolises the power to raise much more money locally and spend it on what they need. Ideally this revenue would be in the form of property taxes, which are too low and are based on out-of-date valuations. Cities will develop an appetite for building if more of the proceeds come their way.
布朗有一些解决这些问题的好主意，比如从白厅整合资金来源。但是工党和保守党都没有接受显而易见的处方: 给予大都市在当地筹集更多资金的权力，并将其用于他们所需要的地方。理想情况下，这种收入将以财产税的形式出现，但财产税太低，而且是基于过时的估值评估的。如果有更多的收益流入城市，它们就会对建筑产生兴趣。
Britain’s northern lites
They need more freedom, too. Greater Manchester has been allowed to plan for housing and office development at metropolitan scale, and is making a good go of it. Other metropolises are still denied that power. Mr Burnham is also being allowed to unpick one of Margaret Thatcher’s less wise reforms, in which buses outside London were privatised and deregulated. But it was a hell of a fight, and required a court case.
他们也需要更多的自由。大曼彻斯特已经被允许在大都市规模上规划住房和办公室的发展，并且正在做得很好。其他大都市仍然没有这种权力。伯纳姆还被允许取消玛格丽特•撒切尔的一项不太明智的改革，即伦敦以外的公共汽车私有化和解除管制。但这是一场激烈的战斗，需要法庭审理。
Freer cities will inevitably make mistakes. More local revenue-raising risks widening the gap between the poorest and richest places; a mechanism for redistributing money that does not squelch all incentives to develop will be needed. But Britain’s economy cannot keep relying so heavily on London. And its second-tier cities cannot thrive unless they have more control of their destinies. Time to free the north.
更自由的城市不可避免地会犯错误。增加地方收入有扩大最贫穷和最富裕地区差距的风险; 需要的是一种不会压制所有发展动机的资金再分配机制。但英国经济不能继续如此严重地依赖伦敦。如果英国二线城市不能更好地掌控自己的命运，它们就无法繁荣发展。是时候解放英国北部了。
