Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera English, May 10, 2013En Español

Dean Baker
The Exchange (Yahoo! Finance), May 10, 2013

Casey Mulligan used his Economix blog post to discuss the topic of work sharing. It's always good to see work sharing get some attention and Mulligan raises many of the right issues.

I will correct a couple of points. Mulligan tells readers:

"It is also possible that work-sharing would reduce employment by making jobs less attractive to people who desire full-time work. One reason that people sometimes justify commuting long distances to work or enrolling in demanding training programs – trucking and nursing are two such occupations — is that they expect to recoup those cost by taking advantages of opportunities to earn extra by working long hours."

Neither of these claims is quite right. Long commutes are a disincentive to short workdays, but one could easily imagine shorter working hours being associated with fewer working days rather than shorter work days. (Anyone hear of a 4-day week, say 4 days at 8-9 hours per day?) Of course, if most workers had fewer week days then we would all enjoy shorter commutes.

The other point about fewer hours providing less incentive to train for jobs needs two important qualifications. First, if work sharing is a short-term alternative to layoffs, then it does not imply a reduction in average hours. It would simply reduce the risk of being unemployed and replace it with an increased risk of being forced to work fewer than desired hours. If we assume that most workers are risk averse, this should increase the desirability of training for jobs since there will be a lower probability of being out of work altogether.

If we follow the route of Western Europe and have shorter work years (they work on average about 20 percent less than us), then it is important to keep in mind that no one is literally being prevented from working. In other words, in countries where the average work year is 1500 hours, no one arrests truck drivers or nurses who want to work extra hours. If they want to find a second part-time job in addition to their normal full-time job they are free to do so, just as many people in the United States work at more than one job.

Much analysis of the economy is excessively swayed by one or two economic reports or short-term fluctuations that may be driven by random factors like the weather. This appears to be the case following the Labor Department’s release of the April jobs report last week. In a post for the Roosevelt Institute's Econobytes, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, on why the April jobs report does not presage an economic boom:

The April jobs report showed somewhat faster than expected job growth for the month, along with upward revisions to the prior two months’ numbers, and a drop in the unemployment rate to 7.5 percent. This led many commentators to speculate that the recovery was accelerating and that perhaps the Federal Reserve Board should be pulling back from its quantitative easing program. A more careful assessment of the data does not support this view.

• The Commerce Department released a report showing that durable goods orders had declined 4.0 percent in March from their February level.
• Even pulling out the volatile transportation component, the drop was still 2.0 percent.
• More narrowly, new orders for non-defense capital goods (excluding aircraft) rose 0.9 percent in March, but were still almost 4.0 percent below their January level. The March number is less than 0.2 percent above the year ago level suggesting that the equipment investment component of GDP is barely growing.

The data that the Commerce Department released on construction last week was not any better.

• In spite of strong growth in residential construction, total construction spending fell 1.7 percent in March driven by a 4.1 percent falloff in spending by the public sector.
• This sector will likely continue to show weakness as cutbacks at all levels of government, coupled with weakness in non-residential private construction, offset growth in the residential sector.

May 2013, David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot

Lawyers seeking justice on behalf of thousands of cholera victims announced their next steps after the U.N. rebuffed their claim in February, citing immunity. Saying that they were offering the U.N. its “last opportunity to accept its legal responsibility

Bloomberg’s Nathan Gill wrote a particularly one-sided article on Thursday, in which he states that “Ecuador’s bid to reduce poverty by taxing its banks is threatening to deepen the nation’s economic slump.”

“Slump” seems somewhat dire to describe the state of the Ecuadorian economy. In 2012 the economy grew by 5 percent, and it is projected to grow by 4.45 percent for 2013.

The report also offers no convincing evidence that Ecuador’s taxation of its banks is hurting the economy. 

The article specifically focuses on a set of reforms that took effect on January 1, including the elimination of banks’ tax deductions for reinvested profits and a 0.35 percent tax on assets held abroad. The reporter argues that a sharp drop in bank profits in the first quarter of this year was a result of the taxation. He then argues that an increase in the banks’ interest rates must also be due to the reforms:

Non-government banks, including Citigroup Inc (C).’s local unit, raised rates on corporate loans by an average 0.21 percentage point in the first quarter to 8.88 percent, the highest since November 2010, according to central bank data. That compares with a decline of 0.72 percentage point to 8.81 percent in Colombia and an increase of 0.01 percentage point to 5.79 percent for similar loans in Peru.

However, this causality is not at all clear.  It is more likely that this modest increase in interest rates is attributable to a recent uptick in inflation. Consumer prices increased at an annualized rate of 4.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, as compared to a rate of 0.2 percent in the last quarter of last year.

Ha-Joon Chang
The Guardian Unlimited, May 7, 2013

Eileen AppelbaumThe Huffington Post, May 7, 2013

Most coverage of the April jobs report celebrated the 165,000 new jobs reported for the month which was somewhat better than consensus predictions. Almost no one noticed the decline in the length of the average workweek. As a result of the fall in average hours, the April reduction in the index for total hours worked tied for the largest drop in the recovery.

Catherine Rampell does pick up on this point in a NYT Economix blog post today. Noting the decline, she raises the possibility that it is related to the Affordable Care Act, which requires firms that employ more than 50 full-time workers to either provide health insurance or to pay a penalty. Since the cutoff for a full-time worker in this provision is 30 hours per week, there would be an incentive to keep hours under this cutoff.

While Rampell expresses skepticism of this explanation, it probably deserves even less credence than she gives it. It is important to remember that this issue would only be relevant for firms that employ more than 50 workers and don't currently provide health insurance for their workers. The overwhelming majority of firms that employ more than 50 workers already provide health insurance. Furthermore, most workers are employed at firms that employ fewer than 50 workers and are not close to this cutoff.

The share of the workforce that could plausibly be affected by this cutoff would almost certainly be well under 10 percent. This means that we would have to see very large movements in hours for this group of workers in order to move the overall average. Also, this issue just became relevant in 2013 which will provide the basis for the firms' obligations when this provision of the ACA comes into effect next year. If the ACA is a big factor in the general trend in hours then we should be seeing a very different pattern in 2013 than we did in 2012. We don't.

During his trip last week to Mexico and Costa Rica, President Obama sought to down play the U.S.’s security agenda in the region, emphasizing trade relations, energy cooperation and other more benign themes.  In a May 3rd joint press conference with his C

Dean Baker
Truthout, May 7, 2013

Dean Baker
The Huffington Post, May 6, 2013

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, May 7, 2013