经济学人下载:奥斯本的第二次预算报告

And compared with last year’s policies, they were trivial. This budget’s most interesting bits were the ones designed to rebuff those who say the government is better at inflicting pain than at fostering economic gain, and to help win Mr Osborne’s underlying bet: that the private sector will provide the growth and jobs to compensate for the state’s retrenchment.

跟去年相比，今年的这些政策简直微不足道。这次预算报告最有趣的部分就是那些严厉回绝政府造孽不造福说法的政策；为了让奥斯本的赌注赢得支持，报告称私营部门将会成为经济增长和制造就业机会的来源，抵消公共部门减裁带来的消极影响。

Growth is a trickier subject than cuts for governments in general and this one in particular. If a chancellor has the gumption—and Mr Osborne seems to—he can bend the public finances to his will. By contrast, he is likelier to hinder growth than cultivate it. Mr Osborne is anxious not to seem the dry neoliberal of caricature: his camp stresses his intellectual debt to Michael Heseltine, an interventionist Tory minister of the 1980s, as well as to Nigel Lawson, a tax-cutting Thatcherite chancellor. But a fully fledged industrial policy does not chime with the government’s world view as fixing the deficit does.

一般来说，经济增长这件事比缩减政府开支要困难一些，而当前的经济增长尤其困难。如果一个财政大臣够英明，奥斯本看起来挺英明，那么他应该想把公共财政怎么样就怎么样。与此相反，比起让经济增长，他倒更加可能妨碍增长。奥斯本对自己不像漫画中的新民主派人士表现得那般机敏感到十分焦虑：在支持团队中，他欠下的一些出谋划策人情债尤其突出，包括80年代的干涉派保守党财政大臣Micheal Heseltine,以及撒切尔执政期间支持减税的财政大臣Nigel Lawson. 但全方位的工业扶持政策并不能像修正财政赤字一样，与政府的世界观保持一致。

Some of what Mr Osborne had to say was depressingly familiar. A plan to create new “enterprise zones” might—or might not—prove more effective than similar, underwhelming efforts in the past. Promises to cut business regulations are good but in the past they have seldom been met. And his sensible bid to loosen up the sclerotic planning regime might be thwarted by nervous local councils.

奥斯本提到的一些做法已经让人耳朵听出了老茧。创建新型“企业区“的计划或许会，也或许不会比过去类似的平庸做法更加有效。减少商业法规的承诺是可取的，但按照过去的经验来看，也只是说说而已。他尝试放松计划过度的体制的想法虽然明智，却有可能受到对此感到紧张的地方行政的阻挠。

Mr Osborne’s basic message on growth, however, was that he wants to make Britain a better place to do business. He sees the global economy as a contest to attract increasingly mobile companies; as part of it, he announced that corporation tax would be cut faster than expected, plus some useful incentives for entrepreneurs and investors. (He also floated the idea of merging income tax and national insurance, a complicated ancillary tax: he should have just got on with it.) Like his populist fiddles, these measures were relatively modest, but their thrust was welcome: that Britain can only prosper as an open, trading nation with a thriving private sector.

然而，奥斯本关于经济增长传递出的基本信息是：他想让英国成为一个更加适合发展商业的地方。他将全球经济视为吸引移动性渐强的公司的一场比赛。包含其中的，不乏他宣布将比预期更快地消减企业税，并为企业家和投资人增加动力而推出鼓励政策的声明。（他还提出把收入税和国民保险合并成一种复杂的附属税的想法，他本应该继续坚持做下去。）跟他讨好平民的手段一样，这些措施相对温和，但其中的重点是受人欢迎的：英国只有依靠欣欣向荣的私营部门才能蓬勃发展，成为一个开放的贸易国度。

And a skilled workforce. One of the country’s biggest economic problems is the educational failure of a stubbornly large chunk of its population. Labour’s basic solution was to fix the symptoms of that failure, making exams and access to university easier. This week Mr Osborne found some money for new technical colleges—the hope being that vocational education will one day rival Germany’s, complementing the government’s broader school reforms. That is an even longer-term project than deficit reduction—but even more vital.

还需要技术劳动力。这个国家最大的经济问题之一就是一直没有教育好很大一部分人口。劳工党的基本方案是修正这种失败的表象，简易化试题和大学的入学途径。本周奥斯本为新的技校提供了部分资金，希望有一天职业教育会赶超德国，实现政府广义上的教育改革。这比起减少赤字是一项更加长远的项目，但也更加重要。