Tim Taylor: South Africa: Mired in Stagnation [feedly]

A thorough look at SA stagnation. I lean a little more toward Dani Rodrik's emphasis on the labor mismatch introduced by financialization in the larger cities. Manufacturing is the fastest path, along with education,  to raising working class skills and capacities, especially when coming from a primarily agricultural background. Tourism is good for small  biz startups, which play a role, but it doesn't do much for wages, in South Africa, or here.

South Africa: Mired in Stagnation
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/south-africa-mired-in-stagnation.html

South Africa is a political miracle: a country which managed to negotiate its way peacefully to ending apartheid rule through a democratic election in 1994. After that, South Africa's economy mostly grew up until the Great Recession, but it has now been largely stagnant for a decade. Here's a figure from the IMF showing per capita GDP in South Africa since 1993. (Values are index numbers set relative to a value of 100 for 2014.)

Other IMF stats show that overall unemployment is 25% and youth unemployment exceeds 50%. A combination of high-income cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria and low-income urban slums and rural areas have also combined to make South Africa one of countries with highest levels of income inequality.


The IMF just completed an evaluation of South Africa's economic situation a few weeks ago. Also, in August 2019, South Africa's Treasury department published a list of suggested reforms. What are some themes that emerge about what has gone wrong and what needs to be done?

1) Many of South Africa's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) seem to be in disastrous shape, and the biggest disaster is ESKOM, the electricity public utility. The IMF writes:

Most SOEs face elevated costs arising from bloated wage bills and costly procurement. Cost increases have outstripped tariff increases and cuts in capital expenditure, and debt service burden has risen, keeping SOEs net cash flows negative. Eskom is by far the largest SOE and its position is particularly critical, with an operational balance insufficient to service its high debt—around 10 percent of GDP. ... Corruption, delays in debt-financed investments, and expensive procurement have generated cost-overruns and left Eskom reliant on outdated plants vulnerable to breakdowns (the average age of the fleet is 37 years). 

Other especially problematic state-owned enterprises are South African Airways and the passenger railway company PRASA.

2) In substantial part because of subsidies to the state-owned enterprises, South Africa's government is already running large fiscal deficits--which of course makes it difficult to focus resources on social spending. The IMF writes: 

In the early and mid-2000s, annual output growth averaged about 4 percent, fiscal deficits turned to small surpluses, and public debt declined to 27 percent of GDP. By contrast, starting in the late-2000s, private investment's contribution to growth fell considerably, and total factor productivity (TFP) growth became negative, dampening growth to slightly above 1 percent. Following the countercyclical easing at the time of the global financial crisis, fiscal deficits have remained wide at around 4½ percent of GDP, more than doubling public debt to close to 60 percent of GDP. 

IMF projections are for the annual deficits to get higher, in substantial part because of promised subsidies to the state-owned enterprises, but also for paying interest on past borrowing--much of which is paid to international investors outside South Africa. 

3) Product markets in South Africa strongly favor large incumbent firms, and choke off new competitors. The IMF again: 

Several economic sectors, including manufacturing and banking, are dominated by a handful of big players with significant market power. High concentration has inhibited the emergence of smaller firms, which are powerful job creators in other EMs [emerging markets]. SMEs [small and medium enterprises] have shrunk in importance relative to large firms in the past decade. Staff analysis suggests that rising input costs and markups are associated with declining economic growth. This is clearly the case of large SOEs that pass-on high costs to businesses, thus sustaining elevated price
levels and reducing the economy's competitiveness. Firms subject to restrictive procurement and labor regulations also suffer from high costs and low productivity. A distributional analysis suggests that the poor are more affected as they face both fewer employment opportunities and higher prices.

One striking comparison looks at "mark-ups" across countries--that is, how much are the prices that countries charge above marginal cost of production? Here's a study that looks at the change in mark-ups over time, compared to the rise in marginal costs. 

Here's another figure looking at concentration in the retail industry, which is often an industry that can be friendly to new entrants. South African retail is far more concentrated than the comparison countries.


4) South Africa is experiencing a labor market mismatch, where much of the job growth is in higher-skilled jobs and much of the unemployment is among lower-skilled workers. Moreover, requiring that state-owned enterprises pay high wages means that these firms try not to hire lower-skilled workers. As the IMF writes:

South Africa has a higher level of unemployment and lower labor force participation than both regional and emerging economies. With skill mismatches and economic growth tilted toward the most sophisticated sectors (finance, information technology, and specialized business services), the bulk of job creation benefits high-skilled workers as opposed to low-skilled workers and labor-intensive industries including agriculture, tourism, and manufacturing. Further, labor cost increases exceed productivity improvements—largely a reflection of the centralized wage bargaining that transmits labor cost increases to the rest of the economy—systematically keeping demand for labor (including for new entrants) significantly below employment needs. Firm closures further worsen the dynamics. ... Regulatory constraints that inhibit firms' ability to hire on a need basis limit employment opportunity, particularly for the inexperienced and the youth. To justify payment of centrally bargained wage levels, firms prefer to hire skilled and experienced workers, who represent a small percentage of the population.

This is why one of the main recommendations from the report of South Africa's Treasury focuses on "prioritizing labour-intensive growth in sectors such as agriculture and services, including tourism."


5) In the long run, a key element for South Africa will be its education system and other methods of getting future employees the skills they need. South Africa's education system is not performing well. From the IMF, here's a figure showing spending on education on the horizontal axis, and performance on the international PISA tests on the vertical axis. South Africa's performance lags far behind other countries with a similar level of spending.

The South African Treasury, before starting its discussion of reforming state-owned enterprises and all the rise, first emphasizes the importance of education in its  report:

However, any attempt to raise South Africa's potential growth rate must include progress on the fundamental building blocks of long-run sustainable growth. First, there must be an emphasis on improving educational outcomes throughout the educational life-cycle ... The South African education system, which other countries have used to promote equality of opportunity, perpetuates inherited socio-economic disadvantage: if your parents are poor, the chances of your being poor are about 90 per cent (Finn et al. 2016). The lack of a transformative education system is a key factor in this persistence. Our educational outcomes are poor, even when compared to other less well-resourced countries in the region. This is a major driver of intergenerational inequality and inhibits the inclusivity of growth and global competitiveness. Since the highest return to human capital investments are associated with the earliest interventions, an educational life-cycle approach must include a strong emphasis on early childhood development, which has demonstrated the ability to: (i) improve long-term health outcomes (Campbell et al. 2014); (ii) boost earnings by as much as 25 per cent (Gertler et al. 2014); and (iii) generate a rate of return on investment of 7 to 10 per cent through better outcomes in education, health, and productivity (Heckman et al. 2010). Evidence of inadequate
teacher content knowledge (see Venkat and Spaull 2015) and significant reading deficits in primary schools (see Spaull and Kotze 2015) points to the need for a comprehensive reading plan for primary school learners drawing on successful experiences such as the provision of reader anthologies.

Second, we need to continue to implement youth employment interventions, including training opportunities that remove barriers to entering the labour market and apprenticeships based on close cooperation between technical, vocational, and other training institutions and the private sector to ensure that training needs are demand-driven (Bhorat et al. 2014). Investing in the capabilities and educational and health outcomes of young people is unlikely to yield a dividend unless the youth are absorbed by labour markets (Mlatsheni 2014). 

6) A separate report from the IMF also added a discussion of the problem of crime in South Africa. For illustration, here's the homicide rate in South Africa, which has dropped a bit since 2000 but remains very high. 

Surveys of business in South Africa see the crime rate as one of the biggest problems.

International comparisons of businesses also suggest that crime is a particular problem in South Africa.

Overall, the in-depth discussion of policy steps by South Africa's Treasury sums up this way:

These growth reforms are organized according to the following themes: (i) modernizing network industries; (ii) lowering barriers to entry and addressing distorted patterns of ownership through increased competition and small business growth; (iii) prioritizing labour-intensive growth in sectors such as agriculture and services, including tourism; (iv) implementing focused and flexible industrial and trade policy; and (v) promoting export competitiveness and harnessing regional growth opportunities. We estimate the economy-wide impact of the proposed interventions over time based on when they can realistically be implemented, and find they can raise potential growth by 2–3 percentage points and create over one million job opportunities.

There used to be a hope that South Africa's economy could provide provide both an example and an engine for lifting standards of living across sub-Saharan Africa. Back around 1995, for example, South Africa had about 7% of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa, but the GDP of South Africa was about one-third of total GDP for the region. By 2018, however South Africa had about 5% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, but 21% of the total GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. The blunt truth seems to be that South Africa's government has not delivered in the last decade on many important outcomes: not in education and training, running state-owned enterprises, providing a climate for new businesses to start, not in reducing inequality, getting crime under control, or keeping government debt manageable

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Branko Milanovic: Transcending Capitalism: Three Different Ways? [feedly]

Very interesting speculations from Branko -- who has a rep of being the Eeyore of progressive economists :)  -- but appears  more optimistic. Note the  influence of Piketty --- i.e., there are paths to "socialism" quite different than the particular history of the USSR or the Chinese revolution, and which, also, do not have their feet planted in mid air, as in some affectionate, but impossible, "hippie" models.

Transcending Capitalism: Three Different Ways?
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/10/02/2020/transcending-capitalism-three-different-ways

Branko Milanovic explores three ways capitalism may be transcended.

 

After the crisis of 2007-8, capitalism has entered among some parts of the public opinion into an ideological crisis. (I have written elsewhere why I think this is not a general crisis of capitalism but a response to the decline of western economic and political power.) However, the question  of durability or of non-permanency of capitalism has, unlike in the years after the fall of communism, reentered the public discourse. In many ways, in the West, the situation is returning to the 1970s or earlier when the ideas of alternative socio-economic systems were hotly debated. This is something that had disappeared in the next several decades driven away by neoliberalism in economics, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the imposition of the pensée unique.

 

Now, things are changing, and understandably many people bring their own ideas about how capitalism can be "transcended", that is replaced by a different socio-economic system. I want here to highlight three different ways in which this subject has recently been addressed.

 

In a new paper "What is socialism today: Conceptions of a cooperative economy", John Roemer starts with three essential pillars of all economic systems: an ethos of economic behavior, an ethic of distributive justice, and a set of property relations. In capitalism the three pillars are (1)  individualistic ethos, (2) laissez-faire (no redistribution), and (3) privately owned means of production with profit accruing to capitalists. Until now, Roemer argues, all attempts to transcend capitalism focused on element No. 3, replacing privately owned capital with state or socially (collectively) owned capital. They have all failed.

 

Instead, our emphasis should be, according to Roemer,  on developing solidaristic ethos. Using the terminology from the game theory, Roemer contrasts Nashian ethos where each individual behaves as to maximize his or her  gain (and which in some cases, like the prisoner dilemma, may lead to perverse outcomes) and the Kantian ethos where we behave in the way in which we wish that everybody else would behave. This is a form of a golden rule (behave towards the others the way you wish that they behaved toward you), or, in more narrowly economic language, we try to internalize (account for) the behavior of everybody else.

 

In a presentation given recently at the Graduate Center CUNY in New York, Roemer gave the example of the "tragedy of the commons" where Nashian (narrowly profit-motivated individuals) maximize own fishing with the result that eventually no fish remain vs. a Kantian type of solidaristic behavior where one needs to think that if he increases his fishing everybody else would do the same. The person would thus "internalize" the behavior of others and presumably avoid the tragedy of the commons.

 

Roemer argues that, as societies get richer and as a conscious effort is made, the percentage of "Kantians" would increase compared to the "Nashians" and we would gradually move toward more solidaristic and cooperative societies. A nice example that Roemer used to buttress his case is the increasing attention given to environment where many people make an extra effort to adjust own consumption or sort different types of trash even if neither is monitorable and defections are costless. Still many do it the way they wished everybody else did it too.

 

A different way of "transcending capitalism" was recently proposed in Piketty's new book "Capital and Ideology". In the last part of the book,  Piketty, after reviewing on some 800 pages, the ways in which various hierarchical and property relations that seem abhorrent to us today (slavery, patriarchy, racism, serfdom etc.) have been ideologically justified, argues for ending the ideology of private property fetishism.  In terms of Roemer's taxonomy, Piketty is clearly back to the pillar No. 3 but unlike Marxists and the Soviets Piketty does not require a dogmatic thorough-going elimination of all private property but looks at the ways in which the economic power held by property holders could be limited. To that objective, he deploys a radical yet realistic proposal whereby all enterprises after a certain size would have obligatory workers' shareholding with workers holding 50% of the shares, and no single capitalist (regardless of the amount of capital he has invested in the company) could hold more than one-tenth of the capitalist half of shares. (Thus even the largest owner would be limited to 5% of total voting power). Piketty would allow small enterprises to be managed as they are now with capitalists holding the full power and workers being a hired labor, but as soon as such enterprises would go over the threshold, obligatory workers' shareholding would kick in.

 

This two-tier system at the production level would be combined with the system of the so-called "temporary ownership" consisting of severe annual taxation of private wealth and progressive taxation of inheritance.  

 

The aim of the two systems (at the production stage and fiscal) is to fundamentally alter the relations of production in favor of labor and to limit the accumulation of private wealth. The latter will not only change levels of inequality that currently exist but would structurally constrain  the ability of the rich to control the political process and to transmit their wealth across generations. It would thus significantly change inter-generational mobility. But even more importantly, perhaps, it would change the intra-enterprise hierarchical relations between owners and workers.

 

(Piketty's idea have been criticized---see here—for being un-Marxist in the sense that they do not go beyond the logic of capital or social-democracy, do not dispense with all power relations derived from ownership, and that his concept of social change is idealistic, as opposed to materialistic.)

 

A third way to envisage the change in the modern capitalism is somewhat different and I briefly mention it at the end of "Capitalism, Alone". It is materialistic and grounded In the "objective" relationship between the two factors of production (labor and capital), or more exactly in their relative scarcities. It is based on a standard Marx-Weber tripartite definition of capitalism (used in the book): (a) production is carried using privately-owned means of production, (b)  labor is legally free but hired (that is, the entrepreneurial function is exercised by owners), and (c) coordination of economic decision-making is decentralized. Now, as I argue in "Capitalism, Alone", the current apotheosis of capitalism is largely due to the weakening power of labor, brought about by the doubling of the global labor force that works under capitalist conditions following the transition to capitalism of the Soviet-bloc countries, China, Vietnam and India. Furthermore, the digital capitalism of today has enabled commercialization ("commodification") of many activities that have never been commercialized before and has thus made further inroads into our private life. The dominion of capitalism has become extended both geographically (to encompass the entire globe) and "internally" to move to our individual private sphere.

 

But if the underlying relations of relative scarcities between labor and capital change in this century or the next, if the world population reaches its peak and remains there (as all projections indicate) and if the capital stock keeps on increasing, we might face an entirely different situation between capital and labor—very much the reverse of the one the world is facing since 1990. The relative abundance of capital may allow individuals to become entrepreneurs by simply borrowing capital and not letting the suppliers of funds have a decisive role in management. This is what we currently observe in the start-up world. It might seem not important, but it is: the agency which is now almost exclusively vested in capitalists would be transferred to "workers". The component (b) of the standard Marx-Weber definition of capitalism –the existence of wage labor—would disappear. The system would still maintain the private ownership of the means of production and decentralized coordination: it would  be a market economy, but it would not be a capitalist market economy.

 

This "transcending" would be different from the other two. Unlike Roemer, it would not rely on the change in our ethos, and unlike Piketty, it would not depend on constructivist change in the rules but would arise "organically" from the changed relationship between the two factors of production. Being "organic" would make it stronger and more durable.

 

 

This first appeared on Branko's blog and wad reposted with permission.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Economic Update - Capitalism's Uneven Development [feedly]

Economic Update - Capitalism's Uneven Development
https://economicupdate.podbean.com

Introduction to capitalism's systematically uneven economic development. From Marx's original criticism of capitalism for producing and reproducing unevenness to the many historical examples, today's program argues that there are heavy social costs that flow from capitalism's uneven development. Those costs then become bases for arguing the need to move beyond capitalism.  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Global R&D:The Stagnant US Position [feedly]

Global R&D:The Stagnant US Position
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/global-r-stagnant-us-position.html

Research and development isn't enough by itself. . New discoveries needs to be brought into the economy in the form of new companies, new products, and new jobs. But it matters. A long-standing concern among economists is that a market-oriented economy may tend to underinvest in R&D, because even with intellectual property like patents and trade secret law, an innovator captures on average only a modest share of the social benefits from R&D. Thus, a variety of estimates suggest that the social return from more R&D spending is 60%, or thatthe US should be aiming over time to double its R&D spending. 

In a global context, the US efforts to invest in R&D look stagnant. Here are some figures from a January 2020 report of the National Science Foundation and the National Science Board, called "The State of U.S. Science & Engineering 2020," 

This figure shows total domestic spending on R&D (government, private-sector, nonprofits). The US leads the way. The purple line is China, which surpassed Japan about a decade ago and Europe about five years ago.

If you look at the growth rate of R&D from 2000-2017, you can see that the China is the most obvious area catching up to the US, but certainly not the only one.  

As a result of these ongoing shifts, the US used to be the preeminent region for R&D spending. But now, the the primary geographical  home of most global R&D is the East and South Asia region.

One issue is that the US spends about 2.5% of GDP on R&D in most years, give or take a few tenths of a percent. Germany, Japan, and South Korea spend more. China spends a lower share of GDP on R&D, but the share has been rising and of course China's GDP has also been growing quite rapidly in recent decades. 

In the US, government spending on R&D has been pretty flat for the last decade or so; instead, it has been business spending on R&D leading the way. Business involvement in R&D spending is clearly a good thing, because it suggests that business are seeing ways to bring new discoveries into the day-to-day operations. However, there are also concerns that when it comes to research and development, business can be heavier on the "D" and lighter on the "R." The giant corporate laboratories of the past like AT&T's Bell Labs, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, IBM's Watson Labs, and DuPont's Purity Hall have diminished in scope or closed altogether. Relatively few modern companies finance research in basic science, or in long-horizon, high-risk projects that may turn out to be central to whole new industries.


When confronted with these kinds of issues, a standard US response is to raise suspicions that the quality of R&D being done in China or across other countries of east and south Asia may not be very high. It's of course hard to measure the quality of research, but one method is to look at whether research articles are heavily cited by follow-up research. The NSF report explains: 

The impact of an economy's S&E [science & engineering] research can be compared through the representation of its articles among the world's top 1% of cited articles, normalized to account for the size of each country's pool of S&E publications. This normalized value is referred to as an index and is similar to a standardized score. For example, if a country's global share of top articles is the same as its global share of all publication output, the index is 1.0. The U.S. index was 1.9 in 2016, meaning that its share of the top 1% of cited articles was about twice the size of its share of total S&E articles (Figure 22). Between 2000 and 2016, the EU index of highly cited articles grew from 1.0 to 1.3 while China's index more than doubled, from 0.4 to 1.1, indicating rising impact from both areas.

In short, this metric suggests that US research efforts are more likely to be in the top 1% of the research literature. It also suggests that the gap is closing.

I often see proposals for the US to focus on building its transportation infrastructure, like roads, bridges, railroads, and airports. One can certainly make a reasonable case for such investments. But I also suspect that transportation spending is not going to be the main driver for leading global economies for the remaining four-fifths of the 21st century. A serious national conversation on how best to expand US R&D spending substantially is overdue. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Cosatu Wants Workers to Have $6.9 Billion Stake in Eskom [feedly]

Cosatu Wants Workers to Have $6.9 Billion Stake in Eskom
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-08/cosatu-wants-workers-to-have-6-9-billion-stake-in-eskom

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the country's biggest labor federation and a key ally of the ruling party, said it wants the 104 billion rand ($6.9 billion) of Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.'s debt held by the state pension fund manager to be converted into equity owned by workers.

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The proposal, made in an opinion piece in Business Day newspaper by Cosatu's General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali, is part of a deal the labor federation is trying to reach with business and government to rescue Eskom. The utility can't supply sufficient power to the country and has 454 billion rand in debt.

"This will result in workers becoming shareholders in the power utility," he said, without giving further details.

Eskom is seen as key to South Africa's economic performance and the country's ability to hold onto its last investment grade credit rating. Regular power cuts are hindering output in Africa's most industrialized economy.

Ntshalintshali also recommended that at least 10% of all pension funds, whether private or government owned, be invested in government bonds geared toward social investment and employment creation.

"Workers believe that their retirement funds can contribute toward economic growth, socially desirable investments and employment creation," he said.

The raising of the possibility of so-called prescribed assets is likely to anger investors who are opposed to having their investments dictated by government.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Another solid jobs report, with lots of evidence that there’s still room-to-run in this labor market. [feedly]

A thorough, but wonky, analysis for the recent jobs and employment data, form Jared Bernstein.

Another solid jobs report, with lots of evidence that there's still room-to-run in this labor market.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/another-solid-jobs-report-with-lots-of-evidence-that-theres-still-room-to-run-in-this-labor-market/

Employers added 225,00 jobs last month as the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 3.6 percent, largely due to more people entering the job market, yet another sign that there's still room-to-run in this long labor-market expansion. Wage growth, a perennial soft spot in recent jobs reports, ticked up slightly to a yearly rate of 3.1 percent, around where it has been for much of the past year. That's ahead of inflation, last seen running at 2.3 percent, but the fact that the wages have not accelerated suggests some degree of slack remains in the job market (other wage and compensation series show roughly similar stability).

Our monthly smoother pulls out trends in job growth by averaging monthly gains over 3, 6, and 12 months. The pattern it shows is interesting and revealing. Over the past 12 months, job gains average 171,000 per month. Yet that average has accelerated over the past 3 months. Typically, as the job market closes in on full capacity, job gains tend to decelerate, much the way you have to pour more slowly as you reach the brim of a glass to avoid spillage (which, in this analogy, is inflation). Instead, we're seeing no such deceleration, another sign of room-to-run.

In a similar vein, the closely watched employment rate for prime-age workers (25-54) continues to rise, and at 80.6 percent now stands above its 2007 peak of 80.3 percent. However, that's more of function of job gains for women than for men. Prime-age men's employment rate is still 1.4 percentage points short of its 2007 peak, while women have surpass their peak by almost 2 points. This partially reflects job gains is services versus recent job losses in manufacturing.

Factory employment fell again last month, down 12,000. Over the past 12 months, factory jobs are up just 26,000, one-tenth their gains over the prior 12 months (267,000). This clearly relates to Trump's trade war, and while the recent "phase one" agreement with China may improve conditions in the sector–though I doubt it will have much impact–it will take time for trade flows to recover. Note also that blue-collar weekly earnings in the sector are up just 1.3 percent over the past year, a full point below inflation, meaning weekly paychecks for blue-collar factory workers are falling in real terms.

Today's report includes the BLS's annual benchmark revision to the payroll jobs data. In order to adjust the jobs data to more closely reflect a true census of the underlying jobs count, once a year the Bureau adjusts the level of jobs in the previous March up or down by factor based on more complete data. That factor this year was -514,000, a larger than average downward revision (the average revision, without regard to its sign, is 0.2% of payrolls; this one was 0.3%). The revision is "wedged" into the jobs data at a rate of -43,000 per month between April 2018 and March 2019. The negative revision for retail trade was particularly large, at -159,000, or 1 percent, likely a symptom of the accelerating loss of brick-and-mortar retail outlets at the hands of online competition.

The figure shows the difference between the level of payrolls before and after the revision. The new results do not change the fact that the historically long jobs recovery has been solid in terms of job quantity (job quality remains a significant problem). But the new trend is notably less robust than was previously recognized.

The wage-growth story remains much the same as it has been in recent months: stable gains but, despite the tight job market, no acceleration. The figures show annual, nominal wage gains for all and middle-wage private sector workers (the dark lines are 6-month trends). In both cases, we see clear evidence of slowing gains. Both series are beating inflation, so hourly wages are growing in real terms, but the pause in their upward trajectory is evidence that there's still slack in the job market. Other wage series show similar, though less stark, stabilization in recent months.

Another critique of recent wage trends is that while they're clearly being nudged up by the tight labor market, the trends are not as positive as you'd expect given the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. One way to investigate this claim is to construct a statistical model, including labor market slack, to predict wage growth. If the predictions map closely onto the actual series, then perhaps wage growth is about where you'd expect, i.e., not too low, even given the tight job market.

Source: BLS, see text

The "full smpl" line in the figure below shows the results of such a model for mid-wage workers. The line cuts right through the actual trend in hourly wage growth, suggesting there's no gap between expected and actual wage gains.

However, this isn't quite the right way to do test this question. If the relationship between unemployment and wage gains has diminished over time, that change gets built into model estimates like this one. The way to account for that potential problem is to run the model through an earlier year and predict "out-of-sample." The "smpl thru 2010" line shows the result from this approach. Sure enough, it predicts wage growth closer to 4 percent than the current growth rate of X percent. In other words, at least by this simple model, it's not unreasonable to expect faster wage gains than we're seeing.

See the data note below for details and caveats.

Summing up, labor demand remains admirably strong in the US job market, which shows few signs of age. And equally importantly, labor supply is responding to the demand, as the job market continues to pull people in. On the down side, the trade war has clearly damaged export-oriented sectors, especially manufacturing, both on the job and wage side. Moreover, even with unemployment persistently near a 50-year low, wage growth, at least in these data, has stopped climbing. This, along with low, steady inflation data, clearly implies there's still slack left in the job market, with no rationale at all for the central bank to tap the brakes on growth.

Data note on wage model: The model's dependent variable is year-over-year quarterly hourly wage growth for production, non-supervisory workers. Regressors include a constant, the unemployment rate minus the CBO estimate of the natural rate, two lags of the DV, and "expected trend wage growth" taken from a recent Goldman-Sachs analysis. They define this variable as follows: "Trend wage growth is estimated as the sum of the Fed's measure of inflation expectations and a simple average of the backward-looking productivity growth trend and the Survey of Professional Forecasters' estimate of productivity growth over the next 10 years." The full sample goes for 1992q1 through 2019q4. The "out-of-sample" model runs through 2010.

Some analysts have correctly noted that unemployment doesn't capture slack as well as the prime-age employment rate, especially when it comes to correlating with wage growth. If I substitute the prime-age employment rate into the model, the difference between the two predictions is negligible. My point here is simply that those who think wage growth should be faster at 3.5 percent unemployment are not necessarily wrong.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Interview with Janice Eberly: Intangible Capital and Other Topics [feedly]

Tim Taylor on the contradictions in "intangible capital", or, as Paul Samuelson remarked early on, (I am paraphrasing a famous paper of Samuelson): "They are poor commodities, do not retain value, and, because they are "ideas", inherently are quasi public goods."

Interview with Janice Eberly: Intangible Capital and Other Topics
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/interview-with-janice-eberly-intangible.html

Jessie Romero has an interview with Janice Eberly in Econ Focus(Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Fourth Quarter 2019, pp. 22-26). The introduction notes: "Her research covers topics including firms' capital investment decisions, household consumption choices, and how these decisions influence, and are influenced by, macroeconomic trends. Most recently, Eberly has been studying the implications of rising `intangible investment' — the investments firms make in software, intellectual property, and the like — for aggregate investment, market concentration, and productivity growth."

The topic of intangible capital is still very much a subject of live research, not as settled question. But it offers the potential to be an explanation for some otherwise puzzling patterns in the modern economy. For example, US investment spending in physical capital has is low, which seems strange in an economy which "everyone knows" is moving toward a greater focus on technology. Maybe investments in intangible capital can help explain why? Physical capital can help produce up to a certain amount, bur then runs into physical limits. However, intangible capital may be able to expand output to much higher levels without running into physical limits. If some firms are going better at intangible capital investments than others, this could help to explain the rise of "superstar" firms. Here are some comments from Eberly in the interview:

We're familiar with investments in physical capital, by which I mean property, plant, and equipment — the things most people would recognize as capital. That's tangible capital. But today we also have intangible capital — the investments you can't touch, such as software and intellectual property. You can expand the definition to include things like worker skills that are specific to the firm; when a firm invests in its employees, it's also developing its capital in some broad sense. The metaphor we often use is that Amazon's software platform is as crucial for its business model as an oil platform is for an energy extraction firm.

These types of investments are increasingly important: Intangible capital is the fastest-growing part of investment. It also seems to be playing a greater role in the success of firms. Not only is intangible capital a larger and larger share of investment overall, but it's also especially important for the firms that end up being the leading firms in their industries.

Amazon's business is built on intangible capital; Walmart's logistics technology is all intangible capital. Retail is a sector where efficiency has risen dramatically and labor productivity has gone up. This is very highly associated with the increase in intangible capital, so in retail especially you see a very strong role for intangible capital among the most successful firms. ...

Intangible capital seems to be where firms' innovative investments are reflected. Historically, we thought technological change was embodied in tangible capital: When firms put new equipment in place, it came with new software and new capabilities. So a way of increasing productivity was to put new equipment in place. Today, you can buy the software separately. So the question is whether physical capital is embodying technological change in the way that it used to. Is the technological change actually in the intangible capital? ...

Intangible capital does seem less sensitive to traditional monetary policy. It tends to depreciate quickly, and it's not an interest-rate-sensitive spending category. That tends to make it less responsive to monetary policy that moves interest rates.

Financial innovation could reverse that effect, though. If intellectual property was "financialized," for example, becoming more like liquid assets, you could definitely see credit markets arising behind intangible capital, as there are for machinery and equipment. Now, intangible capital tends to be embedded in a firm. But there are new markets developing all the time that could make intangible capital more marketable. There are already markets for some types of intangible capital — patents can be bought, sold, and licensed, for example. ...

Just like job growth has shifted toward the service jobs you can't send overseas, investment has shifted toward the industries where you can't offshore the capital and away from the durable goods and manufacturing industries. The curious thing was that we saw job growth in the high-skilled, high-tech sectors, but we didn't see the counterpart in investment growth. We saw the hollowing out of investment away from manufacturing, but we didn't see it going toward high-tech. This was my first inkling that something was going on with investment that was different from what we'd seen historically. The physical capital was the dog that didn't bark.

But high-tech is where there's been a big increase in intangible capital. So when you add that in, you do see a rise in not only high-tech jobs, but also high-tech investment — it's just that the high-tech investment is not the tangible kind.

For those interested in digging into the underlying research, a good starting point is "Understanding Weak Capital Investment: the Role of Market Concentration and Intangibles," by Nicolas Crouzet and Janice C. Eberly (NBER working paper from May 2019 is here; for an earlier ungated version from the Kansas City Fed, see here). From the abstract:

We document that the rise of factors such as software, intellectual property, brand, and innovative business processes, collectively known as "intangible capital" can explain much of the weakness in physical capital investment since 2000. Moreover, intangibles have distinct economic features compared to physical capital. For example, they are scalable (e.g., software) though some also have legal protections (e.g., patents or copyrights). These characteristics may have enabled the rise in industry concentration over the last two decades. Indeed, we show that the rise in intangibles is driven by industry leaders and coincides with increases in their market share and hence, rising industry concentration. Moreover, intangibles are associated with at least two drivers of rising concentration: market power and productivity gains. Productivity gains derived from intangibles are strongest in the Consumer sector, while market power derived from intangibles is strongest in the Healthcare sector.

I recommend the rest of the Eberly interview as well. As one example, I was intrigued by one of her comments about student loans: 

What everyone notices when you look at the student loan data is this increase in loans outstanding over the course of the 2000s. Then it accelerates during the financial crisis. ... There's a generational switch: The financial responsibility for education is being transferred from the parents to the students. When the parents lost access to home equity, they reduced spending on many things, but they reduced their spending on education more than on other parts of their budget. The student loans help the family to insure the student's education, but there's a reallocation of consumption within the family as well.

So far, the switch hasn't reversed. So there does seem to be a longer-run shift toward students self-financing their educations. Some of that is a change in the composition of the student body, so you're seeing more students who are self-funding

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