SOURCE ITEMS
Canada’s gross domestic product contracted for a second quarter in the three months through June, a Sept. 1 report will show, according to almost all economists in a Bloomberg survey. The economy probably shrank by 1 percent, even worse than the 0.6 percent first-quarter drop.
“When Canada hurts, U.S. exporters do, too,” Bricklin Dwyer, an economist at BNP Paribas in New York, wrote in an Aug. 27 note to clients titled “Canada (not China) matters more.”
Jeanna Smialek, Uh-oh, Canada. China Pales as a Risk to U.S. Growth, BloombergBusiness, August 28, 2015. Accessed August 29, 2015.
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Moody’s Investors Service has revised downward its forecast for GDP growth in the G20 economies to 2.8% next year, from 3.1%. Moody’s says that the revision mainly reflects the impact of a more marked slowdown now forecast in China and more prolonged negative effects of low commodity prices on G20 producers than earlier expected.
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Moody’s has slightly revised downwards its GDP growth forecast for China in 2016 to 6.3%, from 6.5% previously. Recently published economic indicators show that China’s slowdown in exports and investment has continued into Q3 2015. In addition, signs that employment growth is weakening point to a more marked and broadly-based deceleration in the Chinese economy than previously expected.
Moody’s revises forecast for G20 economies’ growth downwards to 2.8% in 2016, Press Release, Moody’s Investors Service, August 28, 2015. Accessed August 29, 2015.
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International production fragmentation, in which manufacturing or services activities done at home are combined with those performed abroad, has now taken centre stage. This represents a major point of departure from the so-called “Fordist” production system – exemplified by the American automobile industry – where all economic activity was organised within a single firm located on one site or in close proximity (Feenstra 1998).
Increasingly, firms across advanced and developing countries add value along these global supply chains by completing a specific task associated with the production of a finished product and then exporting it. This may be an important part or component required in the production of a good. It may even be a service that is a vital intermediate input in further production.
Albert Park, Gaurav Nayyar and Patrick Low, Supply Chain Perspectives and Issues: A Literature Review, Part I, World Trade Organization, 2013. Accessed August 29, 2015.
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I prefer to date the slowdown in productivity growth from the end of 2010 because productivity growth (in the nonfarm business sector) averaged a bountiful 2.6% per annum from mid-1995 through the end of 2010, but only a paltry 0.4% since. Other scholars prefer earlier break points. For example, productivity growth averaged 2.9% from mid-1995 through the end of 2005, but only 1.3% since.
Either way, the drop is large, and the scary thing is that we don’t understand why.
Alan S. Blinder, The Mystery of Declining Productivity Growth, The Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2015. Accessed August 29, 2015.
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In advanced economies, where plenty of sectors have both the money and the will to invest in automation, growth in productivity (measured by value added per employee or hours worked) has been low for at least 15 years. And, in the years since the 2008 global financial crisis, these countries’ overall economic growth has been meager, too – just 4% or less on average.
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Hence the question on the minds of politicians and economists alike: Is the productivity slowdown a permanent condition and constraint on growth, or is it a transitional phenomenon?
Michael Spence, Automation, Productivity, and Growth, Project Syndicate, August 26, 2015. Accessed August 29, 2015.
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This paper offers an integrated analysis of outsourcing, offshoring, and foreign direct investment within a systems view of international business. This view takes the supply chain rather than the firm as the basic unit of analysis. It argues that competition in the global economy selects supply chains that maximise the joint profit of all the firms in the chain. The systems view is compared with the firm-centred view commonly used in strategy literature. The paper shows that a firm’s strategy must be embedded within an efficient supply-chain strategy, and that this strategy must be negotiated with, rather than imposed upon, other firms.
From the Abstract, Mark Casson & Nigel Wadeson, The Economic Theory of International Supply Chains: A Systems View, International Journal of the Economics of Business, Volume 20, Issue 2, 2013. Accessed August 27, 2015.
COMMENTS
Most economists explain a slowdown in a nation’s economic growth in terms of stagnant productivity growth. Yet it is seriously questionable whether such a thing as the productivity of a nation is a meaningful statistic at this late date in the development of the world economy.
Global supply chains now distribute production processes across multiple nations. Even the local bakery is, even if unwittingly, often part of supply chains that transcends national borders. The development of the global supply chain system has reached such a level of maturity that some researchers argue that the supply chain, not the individual firm, is the key competitive unit in the world economy.
The implications for measuring productivity seem obvious. If the competitive unit is a supply chain, then it is the productivity of a supply chain as a whole that is relevant to economic growth. If supply chains cross national boundaries, then measuring the productivity of only the part that is within a national boundary will obscure the positive or negative impact on total supply chain productivity of the “foreign” firms in the supply chain. The competitive position of the supply chain will not be correctly understood.
In the aggregate, measuring the productivity of a nation’s firms rather than the productivity of the supply chains in which the nation’s firms operate will lead economists and policy makers to misunderstand their nation’s prospects for economic growth. That, in turn, will lead to misguided expectations about employment and wage growth.
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