众所周知，中国是一个被冠以“假货天堂”的国家。但你知道，这是为何吗？实际上，中国人的消费习惯是相当遭人诟病的。
我们知道，大多数的柜台橱窗都是用作陈列店里所售商品。而中国北京的秀水街购物市场却并非如此，秀水街是北京有名的游客购物中心。在这里，消费者可以买到琳琅满目的各色商品。可以说，只有想不到，没有买不到。比如，在秀水街可以找到诸如Prada、LV和Burberry之类品牌的国际一线奢侈品。虽然市场上“温馨提示”消费者谨防上当受骗，切忌“不经意”间购买到假冒伪劣奢侈品的贴士随处可见，但依然有大把大把的消费者“特地”前往购买假货仿品。甚至可以这样说，尽管秀水市场交易准则严厉禁止假货交易，但“卖假货”俨然已经成为了秀水街的“招牌戏法”。市场一层，我们看到一件紫色印有“Paul Smith”字样的pole衫，明确显示其生产厂家为中国广州某纺织厂，可零售价格却是高得离谱的1285元人民币（约合200美元），即使讲价也顶多优惠到150美元。然而，和他们讲价，却并不是件容易事。特别是当摊主拽着你的衣角，不让你走路之时。
全世界的经济学家和立法者都希望中国人尽可能的多多消费。他们极度期望中国能减少一些依赖性投资，去年的依赖型投资额大约占到GDP的50%。没有哪种巨额投资可以自始至终保持理智的。因此，经济学家担心的是资本分配不均，或者干脆称之为“不当投资”。但中国人的部分消费行为依然是有问题的。
假货盛行已不稀奇。曾有调查者在上海一家大型购物中心做街头访问，对其经过的每五个人中挑选一个调查消费者平日购物习惯。202个完成调查问卷的受访者中，大约有3/4的人承认曾购买过仿造奢侈品。此项调查问卷的标题是“穿着Prada的恶魔（即：假货）”。有些人购买奢侈品是为了表达自我、彰显身份，有些人购买奢侈品则是为了社交或竞争活动中不失颜面。他们希望变成自己渴望成为的那种人。根据相关调查总结，中国人往往是心怀第二种奢侈品购买动机的人。此外，还有一类研究显示，凡是带有此类动机购买奢侈品的消费者，往往更容易倾向于购买假冒仿品。
一只Prada的手袋往往包含两重含义：一件好货、一个好品牌。但大部分消费者通常只迷信品牌，而并不注重产品质量，这也是专门研究消费行为科学的业内专家早在1988年的一份调查报告中就指出来的观点。这种心态驱使部分消费者对诸如Prada一类的国际一线奢侈品牌疯狂追逐，甚至能买到这样一件商品都被认为是受到恩惠。
当然，也有市场学专家指出，奢侈品显示身份只是因为它稀有。它是一件“广受追捧但并不亲民”的稀罕物件。购买Prada的人是为了购买一种独有性、尊贵性。所以，那些穿着Prada的恶魔们实际上是在玷污这种独有的尊贵，是对穿正品人士的表象性模仿。
当今社会，假货泛滥，坚持“正品主义者”只能坚强不息的同仿货作斗争。在一份最新的研究报告中，管理学专家这样说道，尽管中国政府一直致力于强力打击不断涌入市场的假鞋、假食品、假药及假酒。但上有政策，下有对策，那些制假贩假的不法商家仍然强令不止，大不了适当提高一下假货的质量，或者将机器换作意大利进口、或者使用成本更高的原材料，比如鳄鱼皮等。他们的普遍反应及共有观念是，假货难以创新，也无法吸引投资。但是，那些公司却依然选择铤而走险，因为他们能从中谋取的暴利远远超出其付出的成本。假货购买者实在是给“正品主义者”施加了更多的压力。他们使这些奢侈品牌少了尊贵——或者更加昂贵。
但也有可能，购买正品奢侈品的人只是强化了自身外在。将自己置身于较“优越”的社会地位。虽然，提升社会地位仅仅依靠这些奢侈品是不够的，但这些东西却是必须拥有的。就像有些人花重金购买昂贵的手表汽车，也是为了使自己在社会地位的阶梯上常保领先地位。他们购买商品的时候，往往会仔细权衡这笔巨额支出能换来多少的声望。而不会考虑其他人需要花多少代价才能保住社会地位。这样疯狂的“军备竞赛”所带来的后果就是，中国可能会过度的消费奢侈品。中国的消费者人数只占全球6%，但在上月贝恩咨询公司公布的数据却显示，全球6%的中国消费者购买的奢侈品占到全球总销量的20%。
同情魔鬼
这些追逐地位的浪费游戏不仅仅存在于中国大城市精心装扮的白领精英。甚至在中国的某些村庄，举办昂贵奢华的婚礼或葬礼的事件也不在少数。那些人为了给奢华仪式撑场面，也会为自己或家人购买昂贵的行头，或者选购贵重礼品送给他人。一项由国际粮食政策研究所研究发布的“礼物账簿（gift-books）”课题，讲述了一个中国西南贵州18个贫困村落的真实案例。他们惊奇的发现，该地区最贫困的家庭（日均生活费不足1美元），也会在节日礼物预算这一项消费大约30%。这个数字是同等贫困印度人的两倍。当一个家庭突然开始用贵重品来撑场面的时候，其他人也被迫选择同步跟进。因此，经济学家不由得担心，中国人的投资似乎更像是浪费在面子工程上的，或者说精心策划打造富翁形象，以其超越他人。也许吧，他们的消费方式确实是那么的与众不同！
China is known for “malinvestment”. Its consumption habits are also pretty dodgy.
MOST shop windows proudly showcase what can be bought inside. The window of the Silk Street Market, a touristy shopping centre in Beijing, is a bit different. It displays a pair of official notices advertising what cannot be bought inside. These non-offerings include luxury brands such as Prada, Louis Vuitton and Burberry. The notices are meant to save customers from buying fakes unwittingly. But many still buy them wittingly. You could almost say that counterfeits remain Silk Street’s trademark, despite the market’s efforts to stamp them out. On the ground floor, a purple “Paul Smith” polo-shirt from a Guangzhou factory was offered to your correspondent for 1,285 yuan ($200), a price which eventually fell to 150 yuan. It is not easy to walk away from such bargains. Especially when the stall holder will not let go of your coat.
Economists and policymakers around the world want China to consume more. They are eager for it to reduce its dependence on investment, which amounted to almost half of GDP last year. No economy that invests so heavily can possibly invest it all wisely. Economists therefore worry about a widespread misallocation of capital, or “malinvestment”. But some of China’s consumption is also a bit questionable.
Fake goods are rife. Researchers once stopped every fifth person in a Shanghai mall and asked them about their buying habits. Of the 202 who completed the survey, almost three-quarters admitted to buying knock-off luxury goods. The resulting paper* by Ian Phau and Min Teah of Curtin University of Technology in Australia was titled “Devil wears (counterfeit) Prada”. Some people buy luxury brands as an act of self-expression. Others buy them as an act of social emulation. They want to wear the same brands as the people they aspire to be. The Chinese are more likely to be this second type of buyer, according to Lingjing Zhan of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Yanqun He of Fudan University. And, other studies suggest, such status-seeking consumers are more likely to buy counterfeits.
A Prada handbag is a bundle of two things: a well-made product and a well-marketed brand. But some consumers value prestige, not quality. Fakes allow shoppers to “consume” the prestigious brand without buying the high-quality good, as Gene Grossman of Princeton and Carl Shapiro, now of the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out in a seminal 1988 paper. This unbundling no doubt drives Prada and others mad, but it would seem to be a boon to consumers.
Or is it? As Messrs Grossman and Shapiro also point out, a luxury brand confers status only because it is exclusive. It has to be “widely popular but not widely accessible”, as one marketing professor puts it. People who buy Prada are paying for exclusivity. The devils who wear counterfeit Prada erode that exclusivity, imposing an “externality” on owners of the genuine article.
As counterfeiters rush to replicate a brand, the brand owners fight to distinguish themselves from the fakes. In a recent paper, Yi Qian of Kellogg School of Management studies the response of branded Chinese shoemakers to an influx of fakes after the government shifted its enforcement efforts to more urgent things, such as stamping out counterfeit food, drugs and alcohol. Many shoemakers reacted by improving the quality of their footwear, importing Italian pattern-pressing machines and using pricier materials, such as crocodile skin. Their response contradicts the popular notion that fakes inhibit innovation and investment. But firms also raised prices by more than was warranted by their extra costs. Buyers of fakes therefore impose a cost on people who want to buy the real thing. They make brands less exclusive—or more expensive.
But it is possible that buying genuine luxuries imposes an externality of its own. Status, after all, is a “positional” good. To be top of the social heap, it is not enough to have fine things. Your things need to be finer than everyone else’s. Someone who buys a more expensive watch or car to climb up the social ladder forces other social climbers to spend more to stay ahead. In making their purchase, they will carefully weigh how much prestige their big spending will buy. But they will not take into account how much extra everyone else will now have to spend to preserve their social position. As a result of these “arms races”, China may be overspending on luxury goods. Its shoppers account for only 6% of the world’s consumer spending, but, according to figures released by Bain Consulting last month, they now account for 20% of global sales of luxury goods.
Sympathy for the devil
These wasteful status games are not confined to China’s finely dressed elites. In China’s villages, people cement their position in the local pecking order by hosting expensive weddings, funerals and other ceremonies for their own family and buying costly gifts for other people’s. Xi Chen and Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute, have studied the “gift-books” kept by households in 18 poor villages in the mountains of Guizhou, a southern province. They found that the poorest households (those living on less than $1 a day at purchasing-power parity) spent about 30% of their budgets on gifts and festivals, twice as much as similarly impoverished Indians. When a household enjoyed a sudden windfall—such as compensation for requisitioned land—they would spend more, forcing everyone else to keep pace. Economists fret that Chinese investment is marred by wasteful prestige projects, orchestrated by local bigwigs seeking to outdo one another. Perhaps its consumption is not that different.
