There are two reasons saving is so high, Gita. One, as you noted, is precautionary saving. With the economy slowing and employment uncertainty rising, that is hardly surprising. The standard IMF and World Bank recommendation is to strengthen the social safety net., but even if Beijing were to introduce Scandinavian-style welfare provisions tomorrow, the credibility of the system is so low that it would take many years, perhaps even decades, before household saving behavior changed materially. We saw this last year with the pension reforms. Very few workers chose to contribute to the new system because, they argued, they were unlikely ever to receive the promised benefits.
The more important reason for China's exceptionally high saving, however, is simply the extraordinarily low household share of GDP. Households must receive, directly or indirectly, a much larger share of what they produce. There are essentially two ways to accomplish this, but each comes with its own costs.
The sustainable solution is to redistribute income from businesses and governments to households. This can be done in many ways: raising wages, appreciating the currency, increasing deposit rates, eliminating the hukou system, strengthening labor protections, and so on. But none of these change can possible happen quickly enough to matter to China's trade partners, and, as you point out, none of these policies is painless. They would almost certainly slow growth by reducing the profitability of manufacturers that are already struggling to earn returns.
The alternative, and the one you seem to prefer, is to increase fiscal transfers to households without reducing the fiscal support that currently subsidizes investment in manufacturing and infrastructure.
That might have been a reasonable proposal fifteen years ago, or perhaps even ten, but China already has one of the highest debt burdens in the world relative to GDP (second only to Japan's) and by far the fastest-growing. To argue that China should postpone a difficult but necessary adjustment by allowing debt to grow even faster strikes me as a poor recommendation in light of the historical evidence.
The fundamental point is that China's low consumption share is not a temporary weakness but a structural feature of its growth model, and one that has been central to the explosive expansion of its share of global manufacturing. It took Japan eighteen years, from 1991 to 2008, to raise its consumption share of GDP by just ten percentage points, even though Japan began with smaller domestic imbalances and far lower debt levels than China has today. Even if China achieved the same adjustment, its consumption share of GDP would still remain exceptionally low.
During those eighteen years, however, Japan's GDP growth averaged well below 1%. What is less widely remembered is that Japan's share of global manufacturing fell by more than half over the same period. That was no coincidence. Then, as now in China, manufacturing competitiveness depended in large part on the systematic transfer of resources, directly and indirectly, from households to producers and investment.
It seems to me that you want to propose a way for China to enjoy the benefits of a profound structural transformation in its economy without bearing any of the associated costs, by relying on an even faster increase in an already alarming debt burden. This, among other cases, is essentially what Brazil and the Soviet Union attempted in the 1970s, and Japan in the 1980s. In every case, postponing the adjustment only ensured that it became much more difficult later.
My final point is a practical one. There are many precedents for the European Union demanding that large external imbalances be addressed through exchange-rate adjustment. There are almost none for demanding that a trading partner eliminate the hukou system, transform its social welfare system, raise wages, strengthen labor unions, liberalize interest rates, or undertake any number of other politically difficult domestic reforms quickly enough to matter for Europe's economy.
I do not think anyone, including Brad Setser, is arguing that currency appreciation is the only way to resolve China's domestic imbalances, or even necessarily the best way. It may, however, be one of the very few adjustment mechanisms that China's trading partners can realistically expect Beijing to implement within a timeframe that matters to them.