szerző: Balogh Attila
Az 1960-as évek óta működő kutatóközpont, az Atlantic Council 2021. június 23-án lehetőséget biztosított Brian Deese-nek, a Nemzeti Gazdasági Tanács elnökének, hogy megossza gondolatait az amerikai iparpolitika jövőjét illetően egy online előadás keretében. Felvezetőjében a rendezvény egyik szervezője és a kutatóközpont vezetője, Frederick Kempe felvetette, hogy a téma rendkívüli fontosságú, hiszen nemcsak az USA-beli gazdasági szereplőkre, hanem a globális gazdaságra is nagy kihatással van. Kifejtette ezen túl, hogy a pandémia előidézte a legtöbbekben a változtatás iránti vágyat, hiszen annak gazdasági hatásait a társadalom széles köre megérezhette. A kialakult diskurzusok középpontjában pedig a köz- és magánszektorok viszonya áll.
Deese fontos kijelentéssel kezdte: az Egyesült Államok válság utáni felépülése unikálisan gyorsan és erőteljesen történik – ezzel együtt az év kezdete óta folyamatosan visszaszorulóban a COVID-19. Megfigyelései szerint a vírusfertőzés által kiváltott halálesetek 85%-kal zuhantak és 500 000 új munkahely létesül minden hónapban; ezen számadatok alapján jelentette ki, hogy hazai viszonylatban közel negyven éve nem beszélhetünk ilyen gyorsütemű növekedésről. Megkockáztatta, hogy az USA az egyetlen olyan nagyhatalom, amelynek ötéves gazdasági előrejelzése 2020 januárjától számítva jobb, mint a vírushelyzet előtt.
Álláspontja szerint a pandémia hidegzuhany volt, ami felébresztette az Államokat. A pandémia felfedte a gazdaság gyenge pontjait: az áruházak polcai üresen álltak, alapvető gyógyszerek beszerzése nehézkes volt, ahogy a fejlettebb infrastruktúrát igénylő termékek (mint például a mikrochipek, illetve a modern gyógyászati eszközök) sem álltak rendelkezésre. A gyenge pontok magyarázatát történelmi perspektívában közli Deese, az 1980-as évekig az Egyesült Államok volt a piacvezető a fentebb említett termékek gyártásában, viszont az utóbbi ötven évben az ipari szereplők a tengerentúlra szervezték ki, mára pedig ezen termékek 90%-a külföldről érkezik.
A jelenség mögött az előadó szerint az a mentalitás áll, ami a hazai termelést kihívja a költséghatékonyság jegyében, félresöpörve a biztonságot, fenntarthatóságot. Ezt a mentalitást kell kihívni és lecserélni az új iparpolitika kialakítása során. Ezt az iparpolitikát pedig öt pillérre szeretné megépíteni:
- rugalmas ellátási láncok,
- célirányos állami beruházások,
- fejlesztési beruházások,
- az éghajlatváltozás hatásaival szembeni ellenállóképesség,
- méltányos bánásmód.
A vírushelyzet által okozott hiány nagyrészt magyarázza az Deese szerint az első pillér fontosságát. Álláspontja szerint a központi kormányzásnak új és szélesebb körű eszközökre van szüksége a hasonló helyzetek elkerülése végett. Érveléséből kiemelendő, hogy a rugalmas ellátási láncok jegyében nem zárhatja el magát az USA a világtól – cáfolva az előző adminisztráció erre irányuló törekvéseit.
Meglátása emellett, hogy a célirányos állami beruházások érdekében új kollaborációs modellre van szükség a köz- és magánszféra között. Fel kell oldani valamiképpen az információs aszimmetriát: az állami szerveknek fel kell ismerniük, hogy mikor kell beavatkozniuk a szabadpiac működésébe, a magánszereplőknek el kell fogadniuk, hogy nem tudják tartani a gyorsan változó követelésekkel mindig a versenyt. Ha sikeresen koordinálhatnák a két szféra működését, akkor a lehető legjobb állami befektetéseket érhetnénk el.
Deese szükségesnek lát egy sürgős egyszeri beruházást az infrastruktúrába: meg kell erősíteni a csatornákat, amik összekötik a gazdaságot, a munkaerőt és a kutatókat. Rendbe kell tenni az utakat, a hidakat, a kikötőket. Elérhetővé kell tenni a gyorssebességű internetet a társadalom széles rétegei számára. Fel kell újítani az áramelosztó rendszereket. Ki kell alakítani a szén-dioxid-mentes közlekedést.
Ezek mellett előterjesztették az eddig legnagyobb, 180 milliárd dollár értékű beruházást az állami K+F-be, illetve egy 100 milliárd dollár értékű beruházást az amerikai munkaerőbe; célozottan a szintentartásra és továbbképzésbe.
Ezt követően az előadó érvel a zöld, klímaváltozást bíró ipari bázis kialakítása mellett. Meggyőződése, hogy egy ilyen megfontolást is figyelembe vevő stratégia kialakítása létfontosságú. Ehhez szintén állami támogatások mozgósítását látja célszerűnek – leginkább az energia és a tömegközlekedés szektoraiban, ahol a prioritás a károsanyag-kibocsátás csökkentése. Később érvelését a zöldebb ipar mellett globális szinten is értelmezi: véleménye, hogy nagy piaca lesz az egész világon a tiszta energiának. Ennél fogva a hazai ipar fejlesztésének mértéke és gyorsasága predesztinálja a jövőbeli piaci részesedést is.
Utolsó pontját – melyben a méltányos bánásmód fontosságát ecseteli – azzal kezdi, hogy tanulnunk kell a történelmi hibákból. A korábbi gazdasági paradigmaváltások az Egyesült Államokban nem segítették elő minden társadalmi osztály mobilitását. Ennélfogva a nemi és faji méltányosságra történő koncentrálás betemetheti a vagyonmegosztásnál megfigyelhető tátongó árkokat. Különös figyelmet kell fordítani azokra a régiókra, amik évtizedek óta a növekvő dezindusztrializáció meghatározó jelenség – ezen területek segítésével a további polarizáció elkerülhetővé válik. Elsődleges eszköz lehet a területek biztosításában az alapvető munkafeltételek ellenőrzése és a szakszervezetek koordinálása. A fejlődés érdekében pedig a fekete egyetemek, a kisebbségi iskolák és a K+F támogatása kulcsfontosságú lehet, ahogy regionális gyárvárosok és technológiai központok állami finanszírozása is.
Ez tehát a Nemzeti Gazdasági Tanács elnökének ötpilléres javaslata az amerikai iparpolitikai struktúraváltást illetően, ami elmondása szerint remekül beilleszkedik Biden elnök politikai agendájába. Maggondolata pedig, hogy az amerikai kapitalizmus és demokrácia lépcsőt jelent az állampolgároknak a jövőbe.
Az előadás angol nyelvű szövege:
Brian Deese on Biden’s vision for ‘a twenty-first-century American industrial strategy’
Event transcript
Speaker
Brian Deese,
Director, National Economic Council
Introduction
Frederick Kempe,
President and CEO, Atlantic Council
Moderator
Rana Foroohar,
Associate Editor, Financial Times
FREDERICK KEMPE: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to our audience all around the world. I’m Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, and I’m delighted to welcome you to the latest edition of Atlantic Council Front Page, #ACFrontPage, our premier platform for global leaders.
Today, we’re honored to welcome Brian Deese, the White House director of the National Economic Council, to provide special remarks on the administration’s vision and plans on US industrial policy, a critical topic for the future of not only the American but also the global economy. From supply chains to semiconductors to manufacturing, this issue crosses borders and goes to the heart of the Atlantic Council’s mission of shaping the global future together. We are proud that the GeoEconomics Center has been a leader on this issue since its launch last year under the capable leadership of its director, Josh Lipsky, and Deputy Director Julia Friedlander.
Some may question the need for a US industrial policy, but we all know something has to change. Pandemic-induced trade disruptions and ongoing product shortages have caused real economic damage. The strain on our system has sparked debates about the proper relationship between the public and the private sector.
There’s no one better equipped to explain the administration’s thinking on this issue than Brian Deese. Director Deese has a track record at the forefront of strengthening our economic system. Throughout his career, Director Deese has been dedicated to questioning conventional thinking and taking bold action to ensure the US economic system delivers. During the Obama administration, he worked on rescuing the economy during the global financial crisis and he worked on negotiating the Paris Climate Accords. He held roles including deputy director of the National Economic Council, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and senior advisor to the president. In short, he knows his stuff.
It was Director Deese who helped manage the administration’s successful effort to rescue the auto industry, and his tireless work saved an essential part of the American economy in doing that. As the United States and its allies grapple with economic disruption, Director Deese has led the National Economic Council in fulfilling President Biden’s vision to build back better. And part of building back better means forging a new approach on industrial policy. So it’s not an overstatement to say that the whole world is eager to hear from him about this crucial topic.
Following Director Deese’s speech, he will participate in a conversation with one of the finest international journalists I know: Rana Foroohar, associate editor and global business columnist at the Financial Times. Rana, as always, it’s a pleasure to work with you. To engage in the discussion please use the hashtag #ACFrontPage.
Director Deese, the floor is yours.
BRIAN DEESE: Well, thank you, Fred, and to the entire Atlantic Council team for having me today. I’m really excited to be here. I’m excited to engage with your global community of leaders and thinkers, and really excited to speak at this topic.
You teed this up, but it is true: We meet today virtually at a unique inflection point for American economic policy. It’s unique in the United States in terms of the speed and the strength of our recovery. Since the beginning of this year, we are seeing rapid progress on constraining the coronavirus. COVID-19 deaths are down 85 percent. We’ve averaged more than 500,000 new jobs per month, and the American economy is growing at the fastest rate in almost forty years. In fact, the US is the only major economy where future growth projections out five years are stronger now than they were in January 2020, before the pandemic hit.
This is a direct result of our vaccination effort, our unique fiscal response, and an economic strategy that is focused on driving growth from the bottom up and the middle out of our economy. At the same time, [this time is] unique because this pandemic exposed economic vulnerabilities that we have yet to fully grapple with: Empty store shelves, shortage of basic medicines, supply chain bottlenecks from computer chips to advanced medical equipment. Some of the depth of that crisis and the fragility of our system can wane quickly. But we’re continuing to see, as the economy comes roaring back, these bottlenecks and these discontinuities persist.
This crisis and this recovery expose a long-term hollowing-out of our country’s industrial base, which happened over years and decades. Today nearly 90 percent of generic active pharmaceutical ingredient facilities are located overseas. And they’ve been moving overseas for the last fifty years. Until the 1980s, the United States was the world’s leader in rare-earth production. Now China controls 85 percent of global refining capacity. The US share of semiconductor production’s fallen almost 40 percent—from almost 40 percent to just over 10 percent over the last forty years. And the list goes on.
Our private sector and public policy approaches to domestic production that has prioritized short-term cost savings over security, sustainability, and resilience, are coming to a fore. In short, this was a wake-up call. And we need a new approach. Which is why, as we navigate out of this pandemic, as we drive through a uniquely strong economic recovery, the Biden administration is putting rebuilding for resilience, with a focus on creating good jobs for American workers, at the core of our build back better agenda.
And it’s why today I’m very excited to lay out a vision for a twenty-first-century American industrial strategy—a strategy to strengthen our supply chains [and] rebuild our industrial base across sectors, technologies, and regions of this country. I want to start by noting that national industrial strategies are not new—certainly not new globally and not new in the United States either. In the early nineteenth century when this country was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial economy, we subsidized transportation and created a national bank. In the post-World War II era, we as a federal government made strategic investments in emerging technologies from microelectronics to telecommunications and biotechnology.
But at the same time, today’s global economic environment is very different. The pace of technological change, this idea of a Moore’s law for everything, is upending production processes, transforming supply chains, and transforming the modern workplace and the meaning of work. The pace of climate change is accelerating. It’s threatening to transform economies, migration patterns, supply chains, [and] the security and stability of economies and regions of the world.
Persistent inequality in the United States is slowing economic growth and risks fracturing the democratic stability upon which our economic success depends. And the approach of our competitors and our allies has changed rapidly. We should be clear-eyed that China and others are playing by a different set of rules. Strategic public investments to shelter and grow champion industries is a reality of the twenty-first-century economy. We cannot ignore or wish this away.
That’s why we need a new strategy, one that draws from the best lessons of our past but also leans into the challenges of the future. Our view is this strategy needs to be built on five core pillars: supply-chain resilience, targeted public investment, public procurement, climate resilience, and equity. I want to speak about each of these briefly.
First, the pandemic made clear that resilient supply chains must be at the center of a twenty-first-century economic strategy and industrial strategy. Earlier this month, we in the administration released the results of an all-of-government one-hundred-day sprint to study and assess our supply-chain vulnerabilities. The key takeaway: We need a new and broader toolkit.
We need to leverage the Defense Production Act authorities in new ways, like investing in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies in the United States.
We need to be tougher in tying innovation that is produced with funding from the US government, tying that to domestic manufacturing and employment at home by American workers.
We need to make strategic investments to build domestic supply-chain capacity in areas like computer chips, where bipartisan work in Congress is advancing a historic fifty-billion-dollar investment in the domestic semiconductor industry, which is sorely needed. We need to get that done.
And we need to work with allies and partners. This is an important point. It’s neither feasible nor advisable for us to re-shore all of our supply chains. Resilience does not mean closing ourselves to the rest of the world. Partnerships with our allies that promote more stable access to key inputs while improving environmental sustainability and workers’ rights is essential. And you saw the president in his recent trip prioritize and succeed in bringing many of our allies to this strategy.
In all of this, we are going to need new models of public-private collaboration. The public sector can’t discern when to intervene on its own and the private sector is struggling to manage through rapidly changing demand for products in highly concentrated markets—supply chains with multiple chokepoints and bottlenecks that have been unexpected and unanticipated to date.
As many economists have pointed out, and as the literature has deepened in recent years by the work of Dani Rodrik and others, this coordination between the public and the private sector is critical to solving these asymmetries of information, getting the right investment outcomes, spurring the right kind of private sector innovation. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve for, which leads to the second public investment.
There is a unique, compelling, and urgent economic need to make a one-time capital investment in this country. This is about strengthening the public systems that connect manufacturers and researchers and workers and small businesses: public investment in our roads, our bridges, our ports, universal access to high-speed Internet, affordable high-speed Internet, a modernized power grid, a transportation system and power system that work together toward a zero-carbon future, new schools and childcare facilities that allow—that are the elements that allow people and parents to work.
We have proposed the largest civilian investment in public R&D on record, $180 billion, as well as a $100 billion investment in America’s workforce, including a targeted and sectoral-based approach to workforce development. Now these may sound like large numbers, but, in fact, these are among the most prudent and modest investments that this country could make, a capital investment in ourselves. The reason is straightforward: Markets on their own will not make investments in technologies and in infrastructure that benefit an entire industry. We know that when the benefits of innovation are broadly shared, no one firm has incentive to invest in the kind of game-changing technologies or the kind of connecting infrastructure that fosters long-term economic competitiveness at the industry, the region, and the nationwide level.
And these are not your typical market failures. These failures require a different role for government, one where public R&D lays a foundation for breakthrough technologies, but the government also looks to pull forward the deployment and the dispersion of innovation, works to work with the private sector to overcome those barriers of information and communication that have stymied private—prior efforts. That’s why we are targeting high-value public investment that we know have worked and that will accelerate innovation.
And I just want to make a final point on this. The proposals on the table are large, but in—but they are in—spread out across time, our proposals are to do an eight- to ten-year investment. In aggregate, it would be about a percent of GDP a year. If you look at that in the international context, it is the minimum necessary to actually make a capital investment that could propel our economy forward.
Connected to that and third, we need to reimagine public procurement policy. The federal government is the largest buyer in the world, spending over $600 billion in contracts annually, and one of the unique approaches that President Biden has been talking about since the campaign is we need to think about how to leverage this purchasing power strategically to shape markets. This is a through line for President Biden across all of his economic strategies.
And we know firsthand that federal purchasing can help achieve momentous goals in innovation. NASA is perhaps one of the best examples. When I worked previously in the Obama administration at the Office of Management and Budget, one of the things that we worked to do was to try to create outcome-driven models where NASA’s procurement was partnering with the private sector, setting milestones and goals to meet mission needs while pulling forward the kind of innovation and advancement in technologies that we know are necessary. Those types of contracting—the approach to public procurement—has opened up new innovation and is just a glimpse of the power that a comprehensive procurement policy brings. That’s why we’ve proposed a fifty-billion-dollar investment, for example, to pull forward demand in new clean-energy products and prioritize buy American so procurement supports US-based manufacturing and American jobs.
Fourth, we need an industrial base that drives our effort to address the existential threat of climate change. We need an industrial base that is resilient to the increasing reality of a climate-affected world. That requires a fundamental shift in how we produce and how we power the economy.
The scale, complexity, and urgency of the climate challenge gets to the heart of why having a forward-looking industrial strategy is so important. Public-sector policy and investment [are] needed to help unleash the ingenuity of private markets, rapidly mobilizing resources toward decarbonization. And our twenty-first-century approach to rebuilding industrial strength puts investments in decarbonization at the forefront in the power sector, in the transportation sector, in the industrial sector, and the built environment, supporting research, development, and deployment in these sectors as well as supply-side production incentives that drive private-sector growth and increase US market share.
This is not just about winning domestically. We know that globally clean energy is going to be one of the fastest-growing markets, whether in vehicles or in the production of clean technologies. Our strength and the robustness of our industry at home will dictate how much of that global market share we can win, and export markets means more US investment and more US jobs.
Fifth, and finally, equity must run through everything that we do. We must learn from our historical mistakes. Prior economic transformations in the United States have not brought everyone along. By doing it different this time, we will enhance our economic competitiveness. We know that by prioritizing racial and gender equity we can reduce the yawning gaps in wealth and opportunity and unleash stronger growth. We know that by investing in all of America, particularly in those regions that have suffered from decades of deindustrialization, we can avoid further geographic entrenchment and polarization and unlock more of our innovative capability. And by ensuring labor standards for all and incorporating worker voice into the process, American industry will be more resilient for the long term. From investing in HBCUs and MSIs, in our R&D, to investing in regional manufacturing hubs, technology hubs, Manufacturing USA, ways to align investment in R&D, education and training, working with the private sector and bringing innovation to all areas of the—of the country, this is what it is going to take to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.
So this is our five-pillar strategy and our approach.
And to conclude, I want to make a final point. This strategy, and indeed all of President Biden’s economic agenda, rests on the core belief that American capitalism and American democracy can deliver for our people and our future. At this moment, the stakes could not be higher. We need to demonstrate that American capitalism can work to benefit everyone, not just shareholders. In the face of persistent cynicism, skepticism, and doubt, we need to show that smart public investment can help unleash innovation, unleash the capacity of our private sector, and deliver strong, resilient, and inclusive growth; and must show that our democratic system of government can serve working people in this country better than any other form of government.
We are off to a strong start, a uniquely strong American economic recovery. But we have a lot of work to do and no time to lose. As the president has said, years from now our children will look back at this time as the moment when America had the chance to win the twenty-first century. Let’s seize this moment together. Thank you very much.