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Fecha IPRI Mensual IPRI Este año IPRI InteranualJunio 2023 0,7% -5,2% -8,1%Mayo 2023 -1,5% -6,0% -6,8%Abril 2023 -1,9% -4,5% -4,5%Marzo 2023 -2,6% -2,3% -1,4%Febrero 2023 2,3% -0,2% 8,0%Enero 2023 -2,3% -2,0% 7,8%Diciembre 2022 -1,6% 14,8% 14,9%Noviembre 2022 -2,3% 17,0% 20,5%Octubre 2022 -2,3% 20,7% 25,0%Septiembre 2022 0% 22,5% 35,6%Agosto 2022 2,7% 21,5% 42,9%Julio 2022 0,6% 18,1% 41,7%
Degrowing China—By Collapse, Redistribution, or Planning?, by Minqi LiChart 1. China’s Carbon Dioxide Emissions (historical and projected, billion metric tons, 2000–2100)Chart 2. Growth Rates of China’s Real GDP (historical and projected, 2000–2100)(...)Most likely, after the first phase of the transition, the majority of capitalists will find that their profits have fallen to such low levels that the remaining profits (or losses) could no longer justify the investment risk. In this case, the capitalists will further reduce their investment, making it necessary for the socialist government to further increase public investment to stabilize effective demand and maintain society’s simple reproduction.Therefore, once a society is committed to zero economic growth, the underlying logic of transition will step by step eliminate most (if not all) capitalist private investment and replace it with public investment. Investment means obtaining either new capital assets or new means of production. Once the public investment accounts for most of society’s total investment, over time most of the means of production will be under social ownership through the government. Degrowth by Planning?The previous section argues that, if the socialist government is serious in its commitment to zero growth and sustainability, the transition to zero economic growth will inevitably lead to gradual replacement of capitalist private ownership by social ownershipSome argue that a future zero growth economy can be built on the basis of worker-owned, small, collective firms.49 From the society’s point of view, worker-owned collective firms remain “private” enterprises in the sense that certain means of production are exclusively owned by a group of individual workers, with access denied to the rest of the society.Worker-owned collective enterprises are enterprises within a market economy and subject to the constant pressure of market competition. To gain advantage or to survive competition, each worker-owned enterprise will be either strongly motivated or forced to use a large portion of their surplus income to invest in and expand production, leading to economic growth. If some worker-owned enterprises become bankrupt, the unemployed workers may be hired by more prosperous worker-owned enterprises as wage workers. Thus, an economy based on worker-owned enterprises is inherently unstable and has an underlying tendency to evolve into some form of capitalism.A future zero growth economy can only be built on the basis of social ownership of the means of production. This would require that the society as a whole (through some form of democratic government) own all or most of the means of production. The social ownership of the means of production implies that, as far as investment needed to replace the existing capital assets is concerned, the allocation of investment resources has to be carried out by planning through direct government decision-making. Such allocation may still take place in terms of monetary units (for example, so many billions of yuan are invested in this or that industry), but the allocation decision is no longer driven by the pursuit of monetary profit. Instead, it is guided by long-term social objectives such as ecological sustainability and people’s basic needs, which are to be determined through democratic decision-making.The question is, after the means of production have been allocated and installed, how day-to-day production and consumption can be organized. One possibility is simply to leave it to the market. Government-owned enterprises would interact and compete with each other in the market. Workers’ and managers’ wages would largely depend on the performance of the enterprise in which they are hired. Some form of democratic governance may be introduced into these enterprises so that the various stakeholders (such as government, community, and workers) may have their representatives sitting on the boardsF of directors. Profits of government-owned enterprises would be collected by the society as a whole and used for health care, education, public recreation, sustainability projects, and scientific research.The possible advantage of such an arrangement is that movement of market demand and supply can provide both the signal and the incentive to guide the managers and workers in government-owned enterprises to allocate inputs to produce products demanded by the market and adopt the product mix (within the technical constraints of the available means of production) that can best meet consumer preferences.Such an arrangement also has some serious drawbacks. The most important shortcoming is that as workers’ incomes in different enterprises, industries, and regions are determined by market demand and supply, some workers may become exceptionally rich simply because there is a sudden surge of market demand or a sudden contraction of supply (for example, due to natural disasters) for the products they are producing, and some others may suffer from unexpected declines of income due to factors beyond their control. This would not only result in inequitable distribution of income but also create the potential for widening inequality over time. For example, well-to-do households may lend money to impoverished households and receive interest. If the government imposes taxes to redistribute income from the well-to-do households to poor households, it will undermine the very incentive that supposedly motivates people to work hard and efficiently in a market economy.Market mechanisms can also generate some perverse incentives. Because the means of production are owned by the society as a whole, there may be little incentive for the workers and managers to properly maintain and operate these means of production. Instead, they may be primarily motivated to use the means of production to pursue their short-term self-interest, leading to premature breakdowns of socially owned assets. Inefficiency in this form alone may more than offset whatever limited efficiency that may be gained through day-to-day market activities. While socialist society can promote socialist consciousness by educating people to pursue society’s long-term interests, the dependence on market incentives in day-to-day economic activities inevitably encourages the pursuit of self-interest and undermines society’s attempt to promote socialist consciousness.Alternatively, in the future zero growth society, the entire economy can operate under the management of democratic planning. In a democratically planned economy, not only investment but also most of the society’s output targets, input allocations, and important prices are determined by the society as a whole through explicitly democratic decision-making.While bourgeois economists and some market socialists argue that planned socialist economies are hopelessly inefficient based on their understanding of the historical experience of socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, many have pointed out that even the historical bureaucratic socialism achieved spectacular success in meeting people’s basic needs and the widely publicized inefficiency of socialist planning was greatly exaggerated.In the future, democratic governance in combination with new computer and network technologies may help to substantially improve the efficiency of socialist planning. In any case, the previous sections have argued that the requirements of ecological sustainability with zero growth necessitate social ownership of the means of production and planned allocation of investment resources. Investment in fixed assets will largely determine a society’s allocation of productive capacity between different industries and sectors. Given these physical and institutional constraints, whatever differences in efficiency that may arise because of different arrangements of day-to-day production and consumption activities are likely to be small.A society based on democratic planning is likely to be much more egalitarian in income distribution compared to a society where day-to-day production and consumption activities are driven by the market. Having removed market mechanisms from most economic activities, individuals in a planned society are much less likely to be motivated by short-term self-interest and are more inclined to behave in accordance with long-term social interests.All the possible benefits and disadvantages, as well as opportunities and risks, will have to be weighed and deliberated by the people who are building the future socialist society with zero growth. What is clear is that ecological sustainability requires degrowth and degrowth demands socialism.