Paul robs Peter, then Peter robs Paul. Round and round and round. And we all fall down.
SOURCE ITEMS
At the price of a doubling in unemployment and near-10 percent plunge in labor costs, the so-called peripheral euro nations are reviving manufacturing and trade. In Spain, exports reached a record 222.6 billion euros ($287 billion) in 2012.
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Joblessness already tops 25 percent in both Spain and Greece…
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Ford Motor Co. (F) (F) said at the end of last year it will increase capacity near Valencia as it shuts plants in the U.K. and Belgium. Peugeot (UG), which is cutting workers in its home market of France, is also lifting output in Spain and Portugal.
Simon Kennedy, Even Greece Exports Rise in Europe’s 11% Jobless Recovery, Bloomberg, March 21, 2013.
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Barely two years ago, Brazil’s rapid economic growth and expanding middle class made it the darling of financial markets …. With slow growth and stalled economic reforms, financial markets were about to write off Mexico as a lost cause.
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So Brazil has become the star that disappoints, while Mexico is the underperformer that suddenly shines.
Andres Velasco, A Tale of Two Countries, Project Syndicate, March 14, 2013.
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Mexico’s minimum wage commission set the increase for 2012 at 4.2% for all three of the country’s geographic zones…
The increase brings the minimum wage in Mexico to 62.33 pesos ($4.60) a day for zone A, which includes Mexico City. The minimum wage is slightly lower in other geographic zones.
What is the minimum wage in Mexico?,Maquila Reference website.
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Perry sent letters to 26 gun and ammunition manufacturers earlier this month inviting them to consider a move to Texas if the states they currently operate in impose “restrictive laws” on their industry, according to a copy of the letter and list of the manufacturers provided to ABC News by the governor’s office.
“As you consider your options … you may choose to consider relocating your manufacturing operations to a state that is more business-friendly. There is no other state that fits the definition of business-friendly like Texas,” Perry wrote, pointing out financial incentives the state offers companies.
Arlette Saenz, Rick Perry Invites Gun Manufacturers to Set Up Shop in Texas, ABC News, February 22, 2013.
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We find that products systematically tend to co-appear, and that product appearances lead to massive disappearance events of existing products in the following years…. This is an empirical validation of the dominance of cascading competitive replacement events on the scale of national economies, i.e. creative destruction.
Peter Klimek, Ricardo Hausmann, and Stefan Thurner, Empirical confirmation of creative destruction from world trade data, arxiv, December 13, 2011.
COMMENTS
A few years back, business was booming in Ireland and experts were hailing it as the land of smart policy. Then things went south. Overnight, the land of smart policy became the land of dumb policy.
The problem for the world’s nations isn’t whether a nation adopts smart policy or dumb policy. The problem is that the world economy is a system of trade and competition in which nations, provinces, states, and local governments design and implement policies to steal jobs and earnings from other nations, provinces, states, and local governments. As a result, there is much less actual job and earnings growth in the world economy and much more inter-territorial migration of jobs and earnings (churning) than is typically claimed by the champions of global capitalism.
This has always been the case, but decades ago this reality was much less visible to Americans and Western Europeans because the churning took place at a much slower pace and the winners and losers were not so intimately connected to each other through global systems of communication and transportation. Moreover, we were usually winners in the global job churning system, so we had little incentive see the churning.
In the interceding decades, the rate of inter-territorial movement of jobs and earnings has been accelerating. Global communications and transportation systems have expanded and improved markedly, facilitating ever rising numbers of inter-territorial financial transactions and deal closings. In turn, job and earnings churning has and continues to accelerate.
As the churning accelerates, it is becoming more visible to Americans and Europeans. One reason is that the same communications and transportation systems that are accelerating churning are also connecting the peoples affected by the churning more closely together. More importantly, though, Americans and Europeans are now more often finding themselves on the losing side of the churning. Seeing the churning has become more likely because not seeing the churning only leads to policies that work only over a short period of time that is growing increasingly shorter.
The best policy move for everyone is for the world’s leaders to put an end to global job and earnings churning. In the U.S. we certainly must put an end to interstate job and earnings churning, or our political gridlock and policy floundering will likely pull us deeper into an accelerating spiral of economic and political disasters.
IWE WORK FUTURES 