Productivity and Competiveness Measures

Before getting more into our specific measures of productivity/competitiveness I want to start by reviewing our concepts pertaining to it.

下面，我们将深入描述我们的生产力措施 - 无论是为了获得什么付出代价，还是为文化付出代价。

A country’s competitiveness is driven by the value of all that it offers relative to the value of what others offer 一个国家的竞争力是由其所提供的所有价值相对于其他人提供的价值所驱动的

—most importantly the value of its people relative to their cost. In a global economy, countries that are more productive will not only produce better value products, but they will also attract investment and new businesses, and they will compel the means of production to move. We expect the producers who are more competitive to both 1) sell more in their own country and other countries, and 2) move their production to countries where they can produce more cost-effectively.

• 最重要的是其人民的价值相对于其成本。在全球经济中，生产力较高的国家不仅能生产出更好的产品，而且还会吸引投资和新业务，迫使生产资料移动。我们期望更有竞争力的生产者1）在自己的国家和其他国家销售更多的产品，以及2）将生产转移到能够更有成本效益地生产的国家。

As explained, the most important way countries differentiate themselves is through their labor: whether it is more attractive for a company to hire their workers than to hire workers in a different country. This is not just a function of whether the workers are more productive today. It’s a function of the attributes that make them more attractive to hire and invest in over the long term. Since ultimately the only way one can become more productive is through working harder or working smarter, it makes intuitive sense to us that education and work ethic are the most important attributes that matter. Those countries that offer these most cost-competitively tend to do the best. A country may also be more attractive because it’s a cheap place to build a factory or because the returns of building new capital and technologies are higher. Additionally, countries that save and invest more tend to grow faster by creating new innovations, capital equipment and infrastructure that help improve the productivity of their workforce relative to other countries with more limited investment rates.

如所解释的那样，国家区分自己的最重要的方式是通过劳动：一家公司雇用工人比在另一个国家雇用工人更有吸引力。这不仅仅是工人今天更有成效的功能。这是属性的功能，使他们更有吸引力，长期雇用和投资。最终，通过更加努力工作或者更聪明的工作，最终只有这样才能使我们变得更有成效，这对我们来说直观有意义，就是教育和工作伦理是最重要的属性。那些提供这些成本最具竞争力的国家倾向于做最好的。一个国家也可能更有吸引力，因为它是建造工厂的便宜的地方，或者因为建立新的资本和技术的回报更高。此外，通过创建新的创新，资本设备和基础设施，有助于提高劳动力相对于其他投资率有限的其他国家的生产力，保存和投资更多的国家往往会更快地增长。

These are the most important ingredients for the productivity growth of a country. But that’s not all there is to it. Partly, culture drives the decisions people make about factors like savings rates or how many hours they work each week. But culture can also help explain why a country can appear to have the right ingredients for growth but consistently underperform.

这些是一个国家生产率增长最重要的因素。但这不是全部。部分地，文化驱动人们对储蓄率或每周工作几个小时的因素的决定。但文化也可以帮助解释为什么一个国家似乎可以拥有正确的增长成分，但是一直表现不佳。

Culture matters a lot. Ultimately how a country develops is a function of human behavior and the decisions its people make. Many of those decisions are captured in the attributes that go into a country’s relative productivity (like how much people save or how hard they work). But you can learn a lot about the psychology of the different players in the economy and their motivations by staring at different cultural elements. Over very long stretches of time a country’s cultural evolution is at the core of its long-term cycles (from being poor and believing it’s poor to becoming rich). Over any decade, the way we think about culture is that it can help explain why a country can appear to have the right ingredients for growth but consistently underperform or outperform. For us it makes intuitive sense that countries that emphasize individual self-reliance and striving to achieve are more likely to succeed by creating a meritocratic environment where incentives are based largely on market forces. Countries can also outperform if they are more innovative in producing new products and ideas of value and more commercially minded in harvesting them. On the other hand, countries can underperform if they are corrupt or bureaucratic, or if the rule of law is unsound. To be clear, we are not assessing whether one culture is good or bad; our focus is on the cultural elements that are most important for economic prosperity.

文化非常重要，一个国家如何发展是人类行为和人民决定的一个功能。许多这些决定被纳入到一个国家的相对生产力的属性（如人们储蓄多少或它们多努力工作）。但是，通过盯着不同的文化元素，你可以学到很多关于经济中不同玩家的心理学和动机。在很长一段时间内，一个国家的文化进化是其长期循环的核心（从贫穷和相信自己能够穷到富）。在任何十年中，我们对文化的思考方式是帮助解释为什么一个国家似乎可以拥有正确的增长成分，但是一直表现不佳或跑赢大市。对我们来说，强调个人自力更生和争取实现的国家更有可能通过创造一个主要基于市场力量的优质政治环境来取得成功。如果在生产新产品和创新价值观方面更具创新性，那么在收获方面更具商业意义的国家也可以跑赢大国。另一方面，如果国家腐败或官僚主义，或者法治不健全，那么国家可能会跑赢大市。要清楚，我们不是在评估一种文化是好是坏吗？我们的重点是对经济繁荣最重要的文化因素。