Contract workers: Who’s the boss?
Courts and regulators turn the screws on firms that use irregular workers
September 4, 2014
FEDEX, Walmart and McDonald’s are among America’s largest employers. Yet many of the people who drive FedEx’s delivery trucks, staff Walmart’s warehouses and serve McDonald’s hamburgers are not their employees. Instead, they work for subcontractors, franchisees or themselves.
Flexible work arrangements have long been a hallmark of America’s ever-shifting economy. Lately, though, they have drawn more criticism. Earlier this year David Weil of Boston University published “The Fissured Workplace”, which argues that many employers have met competitive pressures by splitting off functions to subcontractors, vendors and franchisees, where workers’ wages and benefits stagnate. On September 3rd the OECD, a club of rich countries, fretted that a divide is opening between secure, permanent jobs and insecure, ill-paid temporary ones. Read the rest of this entry »
Beggar-thy-neighbour banking Export credit agencies are an enduring instrument of mercantilism
Jul 5th 2014 | From the print edition
FOR most of its 80 years, America’s Export-Import Bank has laboured in obscurity, providing loans, loan guarantees and credit insurance to foreign buyers of American products from jumbo jets to quiche. All of a sudden, it is in the spotlight: Tea Party conservatives have declared it to be the embodiment of corporate welfare. Republicans are threatening to block reauthorisation of the bank when its mandate expires on September 30th.
The fight over ExIm has drawn rare attention to one of the most pervasive and enduring instruments of mercantilism in the world trading system. Export-credit agencies got their start early last century. Britain’s, established in 1919, was part of an effort to improve its balance of payments and thus return to the gold standard. America’s ExIm Bank was originally conceived as an instrument of foreign policy, to provide leverage over the Soviet Union and support for Cuba.
The global financial crisis gave such banks a new lease of life. When banks pulled back from trade finance after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, governments prodded their export agencies to fill the gap to prevent a bigger fall in trade volumes. Official export credit extended by the G7 alone soared from $35 billion in 2007 to $64 billion in 2009, and has remained around those levels since (see chart below).
Subsidised loans for exports have long been recognised as a form of mercantilism, which is why rich countries struck a gentlemen’s agreement in 1978 to curb them. Signatories to the “OECD arrangement” agree to maximum loan maturities, commercially-based interest rates and minimum risk premiums for insurance. When one signatory strikes a financing deal, it notifies the others, giving them the opportunity to match the terms. Read the rest of this entry »
Free exchange: Fluid dynamics
America’s famously flexible labour market is becoming less so
Aug 30th 2014 | From the print edition
Be bold, Mario
The European Central Bank should learn from the success of unconventional policies in America and Britain
In America and Britain, output and employment have surpassed their pre-crisis peaks and are growing solidly. But the picture in the rich world’s other two big economies is darker. In the second quarter Japanese output shrank sharply, largely because consumers had accelerated purchases in the first quarter in order to avoid a consumption-tax rise. The euro zone’s woes are harder to dismiss: second-quarter output was flat, and it remains no higher than it was in 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
A less dovish Yellen, a more dovish Draghi
Aug 23rd 2014, 4:14 by G.I. | JACKSON HOLE, WY.
The contradictory signals generated by American labour market data in the last year have provided grist for both hawks and doves at the Federal Reserve. For hawks, the rapid decline in the unemployment rate shows slack in the economy is disappearing so the Fed should tighten soon. For doves, the low rate of wage growth suggests there’s plenty of slack and tightening should wait.
Since becoming chair, Janet Yellen has usually been in the second camp, on balance interpreting the data as suggesting there wasn’t any urgency about raising rates. Her speech to the Kansas City Fed’s Economic Symposium on Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming struck a different tone. True, it covered both sides of the debate without coming down on either; Ian Shepherdson counted “1 coulds, 20 buts, 11 woulds, 7 mights, and a magnificent 56 ifs.” But she raised enough questions about the dovish case to suggest her own convictions are weakening. She was not telegraphing the case for raising rates soon. But it should be a wake-up call for investors who assume she would spin all the labour data that comes her way in a dovish direction. Read the rest of this entry »
How long will the expansion last?
Weighing the evidence
Aug 16th 2014 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition
NEWS that America’s economy grew at a brisk annualised rate of 4% in the second quarter was greeted with relief. After a puzzling first-quarter contraction, growth has returned, though the recovery remains the weakest since the second world war. As of June, the expansion is now five years old, longer than the post-war average of 58 months (see chart 1).
Recessions have become rarer in recent decades. The three expansions preceding the 2008 crisis lasted on average for 95 months. For that, economists credit structural factors such as companies’ better control of stocks, and modest inflation. The latter is especially important because as the late Rudi Dornbusch, an economist, once said, post-war expansions didn’t die in their beds; they were murdered by the Federal Reserve. The economy would run out of spare capacity, profits deteriorated, prices and wages rose and the Fed hiked interest rates, precipitating a recession.
If that pattern holds, the current expansion should have plenty of life left in it. Inflation is actually lower than the Fed’s target of 2%. The huge hit sustained during the crisis has a positive side: it has given the economy plenty of running room. JPMorgan reckons that adding a percentage point to the output gap at the start of an expansion adds two quarters to its lifespan. (The output gap is the difference between actual output and the maximum an economy can produce without sparking inflation.)
Read the rest of this entry »
How to stop the inversion perversion
Restricting companies from moving abroad is no substitute for corporate-tax reform
Jul 26th 2014 | From the print edition
ECONOMIC refugees have traditionally lined up to get into America. Lately, they have been lining up to leave. In the past few months, half a dozen biggish companies have announced plans to merge with foreign partners and in the process move their corporate homes abroad. The motive is simple: corporate taxes are lower in Ireland, Britain and, for that matter, almost everywhere else than they are in America.
In Washington, DC, policymakers have reacted with indignation. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, has questioned the companies’ patriotism and called on Congress to outlaw such transactions. His fellow Democrats are eager to oblige, and some Republicans are willing to listen.
The proposals are misguided. Tightening the rules on corporate “inversions”, as these moves are called, does nothing to deal with the reason why so many firms want to leave: America has the rich world’s most dysfunctional corporate-tax system. It needs fundamental reform, not new complications. Read the rest of this entry »
America’s economy: Jobs are not enough
New figures show that the speed at which America’s economy can grow without stoking inflation has fallen
Jul 19th 2014 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition
AMERICAN workers have had no news this good for years. In June employers added 288,000 jobs, bringing the total for the year to 1.4m, the best six-month stretch since 2006. Unemployment has sunk to 6.1%, the lowest rate in almost six years. It could hit levels long regarded as “full employment” within a year. Help-wanted signs are proliferating, with vacancies up by 20% since January.
Such an ebullient labour market is usually the token of a booming economy. Not now. In the first quarter gross domestic product fell by 2.9% at an annual rate, the worst showing since the recession. This was a result in part of bad weather. Yet the second quarter will only be strong enough to make up the ground lost in the first. Economists had thought 2014 would be the best year since the recession; with growth in the first half of around zero, it is shaping up to be the worst.
Economic growth over the business cycle is driven mostly by swings in demand, and in recent years demand has been held back: households have been repaying their debts; the government has restrained its spending and raised taxes; and interest rates, having reached zero, are unable to fall further. Over the long run, however, a country’s potential growth depends on supply: how many workers it has and how productive they are. The recent divergence between America’s employment and output suggests the country faces not just deficient demand but also enfeebled supply, as more people working without more output means lower productivity. That is bad news for all Americans since their standard of living depends on productivity. It is also a headache for the Federal Reserve, since inflation emerges more quickly when economic capacity is expanding more slowly. Thus it could mean interest rates rising sooner than might otherwise be expected. If so, though, it would also mean they might not rise that high; in a slower-growing economy, there is less demand for capital.
In the 1990s America boasted one of the rich world’s highest potential growth rates, of more than 3%, thanks to a labour force that was expanding by more than 1% a year and productivity, fuelled by the spread of information technology, growing at around 3% a year (see chart 1). By 2007 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had trimmed its estimate of potential growth to a still respectable 2.6%. It now thinks it may be just 2.1% (see chart 2). The Fed has lowered its projections of long-term growth by almost as much.
Even that may be optimistic. The recent spell of strong jobs growth and feeble output means that productivity declined by 0.4% over the past year, JPMorgan calculates. The labour force did not grow at all. Economic theory holds that unemployment declines when the economy grows faster than its potential on the upswing of the business cycle. If the slow growth of the past year was above the long-term potential, as the rapid drop in unemployment suggests, it would seem to imply that the long-term potential was actually negative. Things are almost certainly not that bad. Still, JPMorgan reckons America’s potential growth is just 1.75%—about half the rate it enjoyed from 1947 to 2007.
Measuring potential growth is notoriously difficult. Productivity is volatile, making underlying trends hard to discern. Disentangling short-term demand from long-term supply is complicated by the fact that the former has a direct effect on the latter. When the economy is booming, businesses invest and innovate more, which raises productivity, and people who might have stayed at home, retired or remained in school join the labour force. That is what happened in the 1990s: as the economic boom continued with no uptick in inflation, economists concluded that potential growth had risen.
The great reversion
The optimistic way to read the current situation is as the same thing happening in reverse: potential growth may be being depressed by the hangover of weak demand from the Great Recession, rather than by underlying structural forces. For example, the labour force has grown by just 0.3% per year so far this decade, compared with 0.8% in the previous decade, and the participation rate—the share of the working-age population either working or looking for work—has fallen from 65.9% at the end of 2007 to 62.8%. Some of that is structural: of particular note is the fact that the first baby boomers qualified for Social Security (the public pension) in 2008. Some is cyclical: those who have not found work since the recession are quitting the jobs market. But which effect is bigger?
A new report by Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers reckons 1.6 percentage points of the 3.1-point decline in participation can be explained by ageing alone. It reckons another half point is clearly cyclical. That leaves a gap of roughly one percentage point requiring explanation. One factor is that 16- to 24-year-olds are staying in education longer, and are less likely to work while learning. But participation among those aged from 25 and 54, the biggest and most active portion of the workforce, has also fallen—and it was doing so before the recession hit.
This fall has been most striking for those with less education: participation has dropped by four percentage points for those with only a high-school diploma, according to Judd Cramer, a doctoral student at Princeton University. These are the workers most likely to be displaced by technology or foreign competition. But this long-standing trend was made worse by the recession; participation in states hit harder by the recession fell more than it did in those less afflicted, according to Christopher Erceg and Andrew Levin of the International Monetary Fund.
In theory, a hotter economy should draw some of these workers back into the labour market. In practice, the impact is likely to be small. Many dropouts have retired or begun collecting disability benefits, a decision that is “more or less permanent”, according to Shigeru Fujita of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. And the structural problem will get worse; the baby-boomers will continue to retire, even as the supply of new workers shrivels. The Census Bureau reckons America’s working-age population will grow by just 0.3% a year from 2010 to 2030, less than a third of the rate of the past two decades. Ageing is not the only reason: falling fertility rates and declining immigration also play a role.
Like labour, productivity is growing more slowly, averaging a little over 1% since the recovery began, about half the average of 2.3% from 1947 to 2007. This might be partly cyclical: weak sales and financial crises have discouraged investment in recent years. But productivity growth had begun to slow even before the recession, from around 2005. John Fernald of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco attributes this to the waning of the IT revolution. Led by the likes of Walmart, a fiercely efficient retailer, businesses began using IT in the late 1990s to better manage supply chains, deploy workers and design products. By 2005 they had reaped most of the benefits, the theory runs, and the pace of innovation in semiconductors had slowed.
The spread of social media which allow new forms of working, of automation which increases an individual’s output and of many other technological innovations which, like those of the previous wave, are taking their time to show up in the productivity figures may yet improve the outlook. But such a pay-off could be many years away. As Michael Feroli of JPMorgan notes, the share of GDP devoted to investments in IT plunged during the recession and has continued to fall, even as investment of other sorts has recovered. The Bank Credit Analyst, an investment journal, notes that lower potential growth means business needs less capital to meet future sales. That would explain why investment, at 12% of GDP, remains below its pre-recession peak.
Even if potential growth picks up a bit, America will increasingly resemble the ageing slow-growth economies on which it used to look down. To improve potential growth policymakers can take various steps, such as raising the age at which the elderly receive government benefits, lowering the top corporate-tax rate and reforming support for the disabled. But such steps would take years to bear fruit. In the meantime the Fed has held interest rates at zero out of a belief that the economy is loaded with spare capacity which is holding down inflation.
Recent data have prompted a reappraisal. Not only has unemployment fallen rapidly, broader measures of underemployment which include the unemployed who have given up looking for work have fallen even further. Yet participation has not risen. Meanwhile, employers are having more trouble filling jobs: in May 3.2% of all jobs went vacant, close to a seven-year high, suggesting the jobless lack the skills that employers are looking for.
All this indicates that the economy is closer to full employment than the Fed had expected just a year ago. Given how quiescent wages and prices remain, rate rises seem still at least a year away. But as Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, noted on July 15th, that date will come sooner if unemployment keeps falling so quickly.
The original article is linked here.
Red tape blues: Small businesses fret less about taxes than over-regulation
Jul 5th 2014 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition
IAN TONER, an architect in Philadelphia, recently went to city offices for a permit to build a stoop for a client’s home. The city, he learned, had just imposed new requirements: he would have to get maps from gas, electric, water and other utilities to ensure the stoop would not disturb their underground lines and then resubmit his application. A process he thought would take a day took more than two weeks.
That’s not all. Other new rules require that he prove that his builder has general liability, workers’ compensation and car insurance, and has paid all his taxes. Four times a year he must set aside a half day to ensure he is paying the state’s and city’s myriad taxes correctly. Mr Toner doesn’t question the need for rules and taxes; what galls him is the time and hassle involved in complying with them. “The information exists all over the place and the burden is on me not just to gather it but [to] interpret it. I’m not going to leave here because of this, but they’re all things that could turn a person off of coming here.”
America’s states and cities have traditionally tried to attract businesses by offering them tax breaks and other cash incentives. Yet there may be a more effective way, and one which puts no strain on stretched budgets: make life simpler. Read the rest of this entry »
Optimal crises
Jul 2nd 2014, 20:32 by G.I. | WASHINGTON, D.C.
Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chair, has long said there might be times when monetary policy could be used to counteract financial instability. But in a speech before the International Monetary Fund today, she erected such a high bar to its use that is seems unlikely ever to happen: the “potential cost … is likely to be too great … at least most of the time.”
The unstated logical conclusion is that there is some optimal exposure to crisis. Read the rest of this entry »
Greg Ip 