The rising number of emerging-market billionaires is a good thing
Mar 29th 2016 | Online extra
IN 1998 Peter Mandelson, a leading member of Britain’s then Labour government, said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” Today Lord Mandelson is more uptight; he worries about the rising inequality and stagnating middle-class incomes brought about by globalisation. His volte-face is typical of the global elite. The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, says that rising inequality casts a “dark shadow” over the global economy. A recent OECD report warns that rising inequality will be a “major policy challenge” for all countries.
In a new study, “Rich People, Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms”, Caroline Freund of the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, makes an important contribution to understanding this challenge. She draws a distinction between rich-world billionaires and those of the emerging economies, whose numbers have been rising at a faster rate. In 2004 the emerging world accounted for 20% of the 587 billionaires in Forbes magazine’s annual survey. By 2014 it accounted for 43% of the 1,645 billionaires on the list. In the rich world the share who were self-made, rather than heirs to a fortune, was fairly stable between 2001 and 2014, at about 60%. In the emerging world the self-made proportion rose from 56% to 79%.
Being self-made is not automatically a virtue. Some self-made tycoons acquire their fortunes through cronyish connections. But Ms Freund argues that the fastest-growing group of emerging-world billionaires consists of what might be called “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs—people building or managing big companies that have to fight for their lives in global markets. The rise of this type of tycoon, she says, can be a healthy consequence of structural transformation and rapid development. When economies expand quickly—as they did in America in the late 19th century, say, or Japan after the second world war—they develop big firms that produce concentrations of wealth but that also contribute to broad growth by pioneering productive techniques and creating jobs. Such economies lift up those at the bottom of the income scale as well as enriching those at the top.
Ms Freund scrutinises the lists of billionaires, excludes those whose wealth was inherited and then classifies the self-made billionaires into four categories: those whose wealth came from government concessions and other forms of rent; those in finance or property; the founders of businesses that genuinely compete in the market; and highly paid executives at such Schumpeterian businesses. She treats only the last two categories as real entrepreneurs. In 2001 just 17% of all emerging-market billionaires made it into this classification; in 2014 roughly 35% did.
Among the leading examples is Terry Gou of Taiwan, who founded Hon Hai, an electronics giant (also known as Foxconn), in 1974 with just $7,500. Its massive expansion on the mainland has made it China’s biggest exporter, with a workforce of nearly 1m. Dilip Shanghvi founded Sun Pharmaceutical Industries in 1983 with a $1,000 loan from his father. It is now India’s largest drugmaker, with 16,000 workers and a market value of $29 billion. Zhou Qunfei started out working on the family farm in Hunan and was then a factory worker in Guangdong before starting a firm that makes touchscreens. Ms Zhou is now the world’s richest self-made woman, with a fortune of $5.3 billion. Her company, Lens Technology, employs 60,000 and has a market capitalisation of nearly $12 billion. The American dream of going from rags to riches appears more achievable in developing Asia than in America itself, which seems ever more in thrall to vested interests.
The emergence of these goliaths is similar to the emergence of big companies in the United States and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. The comparison with America during the gilded age is particularly striking. Chinese tycoons such as Jack Ma of Alibaba and Robin Li of Baidu, two internet giants, are becoming fabulously wealthy by learning how to serve a huge new market in much the same way that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller did with steel and oil in the late 19th century. Tee Yih Jia Foods of Singapore has become a colossus of spring rolls and oriental buns by mechanising their production and improving marketing, much as H.J. Heinz did with sauces and pickles in 1890s Pittsburgh.
Where’s the anti-billionaire backlash?
There are significant regional variations in this happy picture. East Asia has the lion’s share of Schumpeterian billionaires, whereas Latin America still has a disproportionate share of inheritors, and South Asia and eastern Europe a continuing problem with cronyism. However, the anti-billionaire backlash that is such a marked feature of Western politics is, thus far, much less pronounced in the emerging world. This may be because emerging-market billionaires seem more dynamic: more than half of them are under 60 compared with less than a third in the rich world and more subject to creative destruction (their fortunes either grow rapidly or fall off the list whereas rich-world fortunes are more stable). But it is partly because in the emerging world ordinary people have been getting richer alongside the billionaires; in the rich world ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate.
You can pick holes in Ms Freund’s arguments. The line between Schumpeterian and crony firms can be hard to draw in China, where the government exercises huge influence behind the scenes. And if a recent slowdown in emerging economies worsens, it may show that some entrepreneurial stars built their empires on sand. But if anything, she errs on the side of caution. She excludes financiers, even though they can also be wealth-creators; and heirs, even though some—such as Ratan Tata of India, who increased the value of the Tata group enormously—are Schumpeterians. Although cronyism is far from extinct, the emerging world has witnessed a big increase in the number of true entrepreneurs. They are a symptom of economic dynamism, not a cause of rising inequality. ?
有錢人越來越多 是提振經濟發展還是社會不公？
作者：黃維德編譯 2016-03-31 Web Only
翻身致富的美國夢，在新興亞洲似乎更容易發生！面對越來越多的富豪，就新興市場而言，是加大貧富差距，還是帶動社會創新呢？
國際貨幣基金組織總裁拉加德（Christine Lagarde）表示，財富不均加劇為全球經濟蒙上了一層陰影；OECD近期的報告亦警告，財富不均加劇將是所有國家的重大政策挑戰。
皮特森研究所的弗瑞恩德（Caroline Freund）則為此挑戰做出了重大的貢獻。她的新研究「富人民，窮國家」（Rich People, Poor Countries），突顯了富有世界與新興經濟體的億萬富翁差異。
2004年，587名富比士億萬富翁之中，新興世界佔20%，到了2014年、億萬富翁人數升至1,645名之時，新興世界的佔比也增加到43%。2000至2014年間，富有世界白手起家富豪的佔比相當穩定，約為60%，新興世界則自56%升至79%。
部分白手起家的富豪，確實是靠裙帶關係獲得財富，但弗瑞恩德指出，新興世界的億萬富翁之中，也有人在全球市場自己創立、經營企業，屬於「熊彼德企業家」，也就是說這些企業家是經濟發展的帶頭人；這類大亨的崛起，或許正是結構轉型和快速發展帶來的良性後果。
弗瑞恩德仔細檢視了億萬富翁名單、排除遺產繼承者之後，將白手起家者分為四類：
1、財富源於政府特許等形式的經濟租
2、從事金融或不動產業
3、創立企業並面對真正的市場競爭
4、前述企業中的高薪高層人員
她只將最後兩類視為真正的企業家。2011年，新興市場的億萬富翁只有12%符合此條件，2014年已增至約35%，鴻海創辦人郭台銘、太陽製藥創辦人桑哈維（Dilip Shanghvi）、藍思科技創辦人周群飛，也都位列其中。然而，各地之間的差異仍舊非常大；東亞擁有高比例的熊彼德億萬富翁，拉丁美洲仍有許多遺產繼承者，南亞和東歐的裙帶關係問題也依然嚴重。
「反億萬富翁」之潮已成西方政治的要角，但在新興世界就不是這麼明顯。這或許是因為新興市界的富豪看似較有活力，超過半數不到60歲；另一項原因則是，新興世界一般民眾的財富亦有增加，富有世界的民眾則陷於薪資停滯之中。
弗瑞恩德的論據並不是完全沒有漏洞。
在中國，分別熊彼德式和裙帶式企業或許不是那麼容易；新興世界成長走緩若持續惡化，也可能會曝露部分企業的弱點。不過，弗瑞恩德已相當謹慎，排除了金融家和遺產繼承者，即使他們亦有可能是熊彼德企業家。裙帶主義並未消失，但新興世界的真正企業家人數亦大為增加；那是經濟活力的徵象，而非財富不均的肇因。（黃維德編譯）
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