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Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Inequality

Workers

Piketty in One Graph

This graphic summarizes the key inequality and policy trends (for the U.S.) traced in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Scrolling through the inequality metrics suggest the key themes in Piketty’s examination of the U.S. case: the now-familiar “suspension bridge” of income inequality, dampened only by the exceptional economic and political circumstances of the decades surrounding World War II; the growing share of recent income gains going to the very high earners (the 1% or .01%); the stark inequality within labor income (see the top 1% and top 10% wage shares) generated by the emergence of lavishly-compensated “supermanagers”; and a concentration of wealth that fell little over the first half of the twentieth century and has grown steadily since then.

CEPR and Colin Gordon / June 06, 2014

Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Latin America and the Caribbean

Mexico

World

John Kerry on the Latin American Economies: Getting it Half-Right

On Sunday U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry published an op-ed in the Miami Herald, in which he gave the official Washington view on democracy and economic progress in Latin America.

“Not so long ago, naysayers doubted that the growth of democracy in Mexico and elsewhere across the Americas would translate into better lives for the people who live there,” he writes.

And then the bait and switch: “The last decade has been a story of democracy and economic achievement in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region’s economies grew at a rate of 4 percent a year, trade with the United States nearly tripled, and more than 73 million people were lifted out of poverty.”

Now the part about the regional growth rate is true. But Mexico didn’t share in the recovery:

Figure 1. Mexico and Latin America: Average Annual Real Per-Capita GDP Growth, 1960-2013
Mexico v LA blogpostimage

The above figure used GDP growth per person, which is a better measure than the overall growth rate that Kerry uses (since population growth doesn’t increase living standards). Note that Latin America and the Caribbean did in fact experience a growth rebound in the past decade. Average annual growth was just 0.4 percent annually from 1980-2000 – a long-term growth failure that is uncommon in the history of capitalism.

The region grew at a vastly better 2.0 percent annual rate from 2000-2013, despite the Great Recession. But not Mexico, which averaged only 0.6 percent annually, slightly worse than during the lost decades. The poverty rate in Mexico in 2012 (52.3 percent) was as bad is it was in 1994 (52.4 percent). So much for “democracy and economic achievement” in Mexico. The U.S. government of course is reluctant to acknowledge this because Mexico has been run by friendly right-wing governments for decades, and NAFTA has been the model for subsequent commercial agreements.

CEPR / June 04, 2014

Article Artículo

NPR Hypes the Job Loss Story on Restricting Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Like building a new airport, restricting carbon dioxide emissions will cost jobs. (If it's not obvious that building a new airport will cost jobs, then you better study more economics. The new airport will pull business away from other forms of transportation and other airports. That will cause people to lose jobs. On net, there will likely be job gains, but there will definitely be people who lose their job as a result of the new airport who either don't get another job or at least another job that is comparable to the one they lost.)

The reason that many people may not immediately realize that most government measures to improve the infrastructure, or really promote any form of economic development, lead to job loss is that the media generally ignore the job losers. They don't talk to the workers at the airports that are losing business, the truck drivers who might be displaced by air freight, or all the workers in restaurants, stores, and hotels who served the old facilities.

That is clearly not the case with measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. We have already heard numerous accounts of how this will devastate the economies of large parts of the country that are dependent on coal. NPR ran two such pieces on Morning Edition today.

It would be helpful if these stories gave some idea of the numbers involved. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are just under 80,000 employed by the coal mining industry. This is less than 0.06 percent of total employment. If the economy generates jobs at the rate of 200,000 a month (roughly its pace over the last year), the total number of jobs in the coal industry are equal to the number that would be generated in 12 days.

Of course the measures proposed by Obama would not immediately eliminate all the jobs in the industry. They are supposed to be phased in by 2030 and even then the number of jobs in the industry is not likely to be zero. If we assume that the job loss occurs at an even pace over the next 16 years, it comes to a bit less than 5,000 jobs a year.

Dean Baker / June 03, 2014