Friday, April 2, 2021

The Spread in Labor Costs Across the European Union [feedly]

A fascinating dive from Tim Taylor on the spread of labor costs across the EU, and the institutional (including political) and economic reasons.

The Spread in Labor Costs Across the European Union
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-spread-in-labor-costs-across.html

In a common market, labor costs will look fairly similar across areas. Sure, there will be some places with differing skill levels, different mixes of industry, and different levels of urbanization, thus leading to somewhat higher or lower labor costs. But over time, workers from lower-pay areas will tend to relocate to higher-pay areas and employers in higher-pay areas will tend to relocate to lower-pay areas. Thus, it's interesting that the European Union continues to show large gaps in hourly labor costs. 

Here are some figures just released by Eurostat (March 31, 2021) on labor costs across countries. As you can see, hourly labor costs are up around €40/hour in Denmark, Luxembourg, and Belgium, but €10/hour or below in some countries of eastern Europe like Poland or the Baltic states like Lithuania. (For comparison, a euro is at present worth about $1.17 in US dollars. Norway and Iceland are not part of the European Union, but they are part of a broader grouping called the European Economic Area.)

Another major difference across EU countries is in what share of the labor costs paid by employers represent non-wage costs--that is, payments made by employers directly to the government for pensions and other social programs. In France and Sweden, these non-wage costs are about one-third of total hourly labor costs. It's interesting that in Denmark, commonly thought of as a Scandinavian high social-spending country, non-wage costs are only about 15% of total labor costs--because Denmark chooses not to finance its social spending by loading up the costs on employers to the same extent. 

These differences suggest some of the underlying stresses on the European Union. Given these wage gaps across countries, tensions in high-wage countries about migration from lower-wage countries and competition from firms in lower-wage countries will remain high. The large differences in non-wage costs as part of what employers pay for labor represents some of the dramatic differences across EU countries in levels of social benefits and how those benefits are financed. Proposals for European-wide spending and taxing programs, along with the desire of higher-income EU countries not to pay perpetual subsidies to lower-income countries, run into these realities every day. 

For comparison, here are some recent figures from the US Census Bureau on average employer costs per hour  across the 10 Census "divisions."  Yes, there are substantial differences between, say, the Pacific or New England divisions and the East South Central or West South Central divisions. But the United States is much more of a unified market than the European Union, both in wage levels and in the way non-wage labor costs are structured, and so the gaps are much smaller. 



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Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Barkley Rosser: The Iran-China Deal [feedly]

The Iran-China Deal
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/espeak/~3/AoOsKXy2Y2A/the-iran-china-deal.html

Yes, this 25-year deal is a big deal, just recently signed and not getting much attention in the US media.  Juan Cole has called it the most important deal involving China and the Middle East since the days of the Mongol Empire in the 1200s, when both what was then Persia and China were actually under the same ruler.  This $400 billion deal was signed on the 50th anniversary of the opening of diplomatic relations between Iran (then under the rule of the Shah) and the Peoples' Republic of China (then under the rule of Mao Zedong). Cole identifies this deal as a "slap in the face" to the United States, or at least a clear sign of the limits of US power in the Middle East, with China stepping forward as a strong long haul rival.

I note only two points here.  One is that on the one hand this is certainly a repudiation of US policy regarding Iran in recent years.  It may be that its signing at this moment is a response to the failure so far by the new Biden administration to follow through on his campaign promise to rejoin the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. That really should not have been all that hard, but it increasingly seems that this simple matter has gotten bogged down in extraneous demands by neocons in the Biden administration, with both the US and Iran now having gotten themselves into a "face" conflict regarding "who will move first."  I continue to hope that cooler heads are engaging in some unpublicized diplomacy, but all the noises so far have been that they are not.  Both sides are posturing, but the US should have just moved. If this continues, it will be the most serious mistake of the Biden administration, and this move by Iran towards China seems to be part of this signaling.

On the other hand, I think that this deal, or something like it, was probably going to happen eventually anyway, even if Biden had done what he should and just rejoined the JCPOA and removed economic sanctions without any fuss. The signing might have happened later and the deal might have been smaller and more limited in certain ways, but Iran's position makes it a clear gainer from participating at least some extent in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) being carried out by China.  Indeed, I think it is clear that Iran would be economically best off dealing with both the US and China and maintaining a balance between the two.  As it is, this delay in getting back into the JCPOA by Biden may prove to have put Iran into a situation it prefers less, and certainly with the very stiff economic sanctions Trump put in place still in place, Iran needs some help now from any quarter, and China is willing to step in and has.

Barkley Rosser


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Monday, March 29, 2021

Time to put the spotlight on corporate taxes [feedly]

Martin Hart-Landsberg  is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon and Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea.  

Time to put the spotlight on corporate taxes

https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2021/03/27/time-to-put-the-spotlight-on-corporate-taxes/

A battle is slowly brewing in Washington DC over whether to raise corporate taxes to help finance new infrastructure investments.  While higher corporate taxes cannot generate all the funds needed, the coming debate over whether to raise them gives us an opportunity to challenge the still strong popular identification of corporate profitability with the health of the economy and, by extension, worker wellbeing.

According to the media, President Biden's advisers are hard at work on two major proposals with a combined $3 trillion price tag.  The first aims to modernize the country's physical infrastructure and is said to include funds for the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports, electric vehicle charging stations, and affordable and energy efficient housing as well as rural broadband, improvements to the electric grid, and worker training programs.  The second targets social infrastructure and would provide funds for free community college education, universal prekindergarten, and a national paid leave program. 

To pay for these proposals, Biden has been talking up the need to raise corporate taxes, at least to offset some of the costs of modernizing the country's physical infrastructure.  Not surprisingly, Republican leaders in Congress have voiced their opposition to corporate tax increases.  And corporate leaders have drawn their own line in the sand.  As the New York Times reports:

Business groups have warned that corporate tax increases would scuttle their support for an infrastructure plan. "That's the kind of thing that can just wreck the competitiveness in a country," Aric Newhouse, the senior vice president for policy and government relations at the National Association of Manufacturers, said last month [February 2021].

Regardless of whether Biden decides to pursue his broad policy agenda, this appears to be a favorable moment for activists to take advantage of media coverage surrounding the proposals and their funding to contest these kinds of corporate claims and demonstrate the anti-working-class consequences of corporate profit-maximizing behavior.  

What do corporations have to complain about?

To hear corporate leaders talk, one would think that they have been subjected to decades of tax increases.  In fact, quite the opposite is true.  The figure below shows the movement in the top corporate tax rate.  As we can see, it peaked in the early 1950s and has been falling ever since, with a big drop in 1986, and another in 2017, thanks to Congressionally approved tax changes.

One consequence of this corporate friendly tax policy is, as the following figure shows, a steady decline in federal corporate tax payments as a share of GDP.  These payments fell from 5.6 percent of GDP in 1953 to 1.5 percent in 1982, and a still lower 1.0 percent in 2020.  By contrast there has been very little change in individual income tax payments as a share of GDP; they were 7.7 percent of GDP in 2020.

Congressional tax policy has certainly been good for the corporate bottom line.  As the next figure illustrates, both pre-tax and after-tax corporate profits have risen as a share of GDP since the early 1980s.  But the rise in after-tax profits has been the most dramatic, soaring from 5.2 percent of GDP in 1980 to 9.1 percent in 2019, before dipping slightly to 8.8 percent in 2020.   To put recent after-tax profit gains in perspective, the 2020 after-tax profit share is greater than the profit share in every year from 1930 to 2005.

What do corporations do with their profits?

Corporations claim that higher taxes would hurt U.S. competitiveness, implying that they need their profits to invest and keep the economy strong.  Yet, despite ever higher after-tax rates of profit, private investment in plant and equipment has been on the decline.

As the figure below shows, gross private domestic nonresidential fixed investment as a share of GDP has been trending down since the early 1980s.  It fell from 14.8 percent in 1981 to 13.4 percent in 2020.

Rather than investing in new plant and equipment, corporations have been using their profits to fund an aggressive program of stock repurchases and dividend payouts.  The figure below highlights the rise in corporate stock buybacks, which have helped drive up stock prices, enriching CEOs and other top wealth holders. In fact, between 2008 and 2017, companies spent some 53 percent of their profits on stock buybacks and another 30 percent on dividend payments.

It should therefore come as no surprise that CEO compensation is also exploding, with CEO-to-worker compensation growing from 21-to-1 in 1965, to 61-to-1 in 1989, 293-to-1 in 2018, and 320-to-1 in 2019.  As we see in the next figure, the growth in CEO compensation has actually been outpacing the rise in the S&P 500.

In sum, the system is not broken.  It continues to work as it is supposed to work, generating large profits for leading corporations that then find ways to generously reward their top managers and stockholders.  Unfortunately, investing in plant and equipment, creating decent jobs, or supporting public investment are all low on the corporate profit-maximizing agenda.  

Thus, if we are going to rebuild and revitalize our economy in ways that meaningfully serve the public interest, working people will have to actively promote policies that will enable them to gain control over the wealth their labor produces.  One example: new labor laws that strengthen the ability of workers to unionize and engage in collective and solidaristic actions.  Another is the expansion of publicly funded and provided social programs, including for health care, housing, education, energy, and transportation. 

And then there are corporate taxes.  Raising them is one of the easiest ways we have to claw back funds from the private sector to help finance some of the investment we need.  Perhaps more importantly, the fight over corporate tax increases provides us with an important opportunity to make the case that the public interest is not well served by reliance on corporate profitability.


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