Friday, April 29, 2022

Dean Baker The Surge in Imports and the Drop in GDP

Dean takes a contrary view, that the surge in imports does not make the GDP report a bad one. Of course, it depends on how one assesses all the causes of the surge, including the Ukraine war, and the not yet ended pandemic.

Many people were struck by the 1.4 percent drop in GDP in the first quarter, with some reports suggesting this was the beginning of a recession. This is not the real story of the first quarter GDP, instead it looks like growth is continuing at a healthy rate. To understand this point, it is important to recognize how imports are counted in GDP, since the increase in imports subtracted 2.53 percentage points from GDP growth in the quarter.[1]

Imagine that the sum of consumption spending, investment, and government spending increased at 2.7 percent annual rate in the quarter (which they did). Now suppose that we offloaded $60 billion of goods from boats sitting offshore, increasing our imports by this amount. On an annual basis, this additional $60 billion in imports would be $240 billion, or roughly 1.0 percent of GDP. This would reduce GDP by this amount, even though our purchases for consumption, investment, and the government had not changed.

Okay, that story is not exactly right. The goods that we offloaded from the ships are now sitting in warehouses at the ports or on their way to the retail outlets where they will eventually be sold. This increase in inventories would raise GDP by an amount equal to the growth in imports, offsetting the drag that imports otherwise would have been on growth. However, inventories were actually a drag on growth in the quarter, subtracting 0.84 percentage points from GDP.

These two facts can be reconciled by looking at the actual amount that inventories increased in the first quarter. The report showed that inventories increased at a $158.7 billion annual rate. (Non-farm inventories rose at an even more rapid $185.3 billion annual rate. Farm inventories shrank at a $35.8 billion rate, continuing a pattern that has been going on for sixteen years, but that is another story.)

This is an extremely fast pace of inventory accumulation. By comparison, in the years of 2016-2018, three normal years of economic growth, inventory accumulation averaged $45 billion. The reason inventories were a negative factor in growth in the first quarter, in spite of this extraordinary rate of accumulation, is that inventories grew at an even more rapid $193.2 billion annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2021. That rise added 5.32 percentage points to the fourth quarter's growth.

So how do we think about first quarter growth? It probably makes the most sense to focus on the measure of final demand to domestic purchasers, which rose at a very healthy 2.6 percent annual rate. This is measuring the growth in consumption, fixed investment, and government expenditures. If we want the fullest picture, we can combine the fourth quarter's 6.9 percent growth rate with the first quarter's 1.4 percent decline to get a 2.8 percent average growth rate for the last two quarters.

In addition to recognizing that the economy is still growing at very healthy pace, inventories have been largely rebuilt, in spite of supply chain problems. Real non-farm inventories at the end of the first quarter were just 0.1 percent below their pre-pandemic levels. (Farm inventories are now at just 53.0 percent of their level of 16 years ago.) This is a very positive sign, in that it should be mean that the prices of many items that rose sharply in the last year will be leveling off, and quite likely coming down.

In short, rather than being a bad report with a drop in GDP, this report is overwhelming good news. It shows that the main components of final demand, consumption, investment, and government expenditures, are growing at a healthy pace. And, it shows that inventories have been largely rebuilt, meaning that supply chain problems are being alleviated. Inflation is of course a problem, but this rise in inventories is exactly what we want to see if inflation is to be slowed.

[1] A drop in exports subtracted another 0.68 percentage points. This is likely also due to supply chain issues, as exporters can't arrange for shipping containers.

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Monday, April 18, 2022

Understanding the economics of monopsony: How labor markets work under imperfect competition [feedly]

Understanding the economics of monopsony: How labor markets work under imperfect competition
https://equitablegrowth.org/understanding-the-economics-of-monopsony-how-labor-markets-work-under-imperfect-competition/

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Contrary to what many of us were taught in Introduction to Economics courses in college and graduate school, markets are rarely perfectly competitive. In the case of the market for labor—a market that, it is worth noting, is fundamentally different from those where financial products or commodities are bought and sold—imperfect competition means that workers' pay is solely determined neither by their productivity nor by the forces of supply and demand.

In recent years, rising interest in the causes, consequences, and policy implications of imperfect competition has sparked a new wave of research on a framework known in economics as monopsony. Kate Bahn, the director of labor market policy and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, defined monopsony in a briefing to congressional staffers last month: "Monopsony can be narrowly defined as any time there is one or few employers hiring workers, so they have considerable power to keep wages low since those workers do not have a lot of other options for jobs."

But monopsony power, Bahn noted, is present not just when there are only a few employers in a particular labor market. Barriers that limit workers' ability to move from job to job, incomplete or asymmetrical information about jobs, and discrimination are all factors that can give employers an upper hand when setting wages and, with it, the power to underpay workers.

Hosted by Equitable Growth on March 23, the briefing, part of a series dubbed "Econ 101," introduced Hill staffers to labor markets under monopsony. During the presentation, Bahn first discussed how the assumptions that underpin the view that markets are perfectly competitive are rarely met. She then described the basics of the monopsony model and covered some of the empirical evidence on how monopsony affects the U.S. workforce and economy. And to wrap up, Bahn discussed the public policies that can counteract employers' wage-setting power, boost competition, and deliver broadly shared economic growth.

The implications of monopsony for U.S. labor markets

So, what are the implications of monopsony for our understanding of how labor markets work? And what does imperfect competition mean for the design of effective and equitable economic policy?

Consider the basic supply-and-demand model of the labor market. According to this framework, when governments enact a wage floor, they artificially set wages at a level that reduces firms' desire to hire workers. As demand moves away from equilibrium and up along the labor demand curve, people who would be willing to sell their labor at a "competitive" wage (the theoretical market rate) are unable to find work. In this hypothetical labor market, then, firms hire fewer workers than they want to, workers who would like to sell their labor cannot, and employment is lower than it would be under equilibrium. In economic terms, wage floors lead to socially inefficient outcomes. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

Effect of a minimum wage in a competitive labor market model

Further, under this model of perfect competition, employers are "price-takers," meaning that they must accept the market wage and have no way of influencing it. The assumptions that underpin the perfectly competitive model of the labor market—for instance, that all market participants have perfect information, that all workers are able to seamlessly transition from job to job, and that wages are an accurate reflection of all workers' productivity—also imply that workers are very sensitive to wages. In other words, an employer only needs to pay one cent more than its competitors to have an unlimited supply of workers.

At last month's event, Bahn noted, however, that "if workers face frictions when trying to find a job—if workers do not know what jobs are available or face constraints in what kind of position they can take—then employers do not need to only pay one cent more than their competitors to have an unlimited flow of workers."

Indeed, researchers document that various obstacles when trying to land a position, the concentration of a few employers in any given labor market, and employee preferences about job characteristics besides wages make workers much less sensitive to pay than the perfectly competitive model proposes. "In the actual labor market, employers do not have to offer pay raises or cost of living adjustments tied to inflation if they do not have to compete for workers," Bahn told congressional staff.

In addition, empirical evidence shows that these noncompetitive forces affect U.S. labor market dynamics, with monopsony power giving employers the ability to pay wages below workers' productivity. For instance, a team of economists at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Burning Glass Technologies shows that more than 10 percent of the country's workforce is in labor markets where lack of outside options for their current jobs leads to employer concentration, depressing these workers' wages by at least 2 percent.

In other words, in parts of the country where relatively few employers are competing to hire, lack of competition pushes down average pay. Highly concentrated labor markets, another study finds, are especially pervasive in rural and less densely populated areas. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2

Labor market concentration based on the share of each employer among job vacancies, calculated using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, by commuting zone

Other studies highlight how one big employer can influence marketwide wages. For instance, research by economist Ellora Derenoncourt (now at Princeton University) and Clemens Noelke and David Weil at Brandeis University shows that as Amazon.com Inc. set a $15 minimum wage in late 2018, other employers in the same commuting zone had to increase wages. Amazon and other big and powerful employers, the authors find, can therefore act as a wage-setters rather than price-takers, pushing wages up or dragging them down depending on what their particular corporate policy is at a given time.

A study examining how the opening of Walmart Supercenters affects local labor markets captures how one firm's monopsony power leads to worse labor market outcomes. The research finds that Supercenters lead to a decline in countywide employment and earnings as Walmart undercuts wages through low-road employment practices that spill over on other local workers and industries—a dynamic that was mitigated in the counties that experienced an increase in the minimum wage and that would not take place under perfect competition. 

So, how does our model of the labor market change when we assume imperfect competition? Under monopsony, the labor demand curve and labor supply curve intersect at both a lower wage and at a lower employment level than would be achieved under equilibrium. This results in socially inefficient outcomes, where the lost wages due to underpayment are kept as firms' profits, with workers making less than the value they contribute. Contrary to the perfectly competitive model of the labor market, in this model, higher wages also lead to greater equilibrium employment. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3

Wage and employment determination in a model of a monopsony labor market facing an individual firm

In contrast to Figure 3 above, in a competitive labor market, if a firm tried to pay only "W monopsony" wages, then workers would go to other firms willing to pay a higher wage.

How policymakers can protect workers from monopsony power in the U.S. labor market

There are two broad areas of public policies that can counteract these forces and create greater balance between the power of employers and the power of workers: pro-competition policies and pro-worker policies.

To boost competition in labor markets, policymakers can start by banning noncompete agreements—contracts that limit workers' ability to move from job to job and that affect a large share of low-wage workers. Public policy also should support workers' bargaining power by raising the federal minimum wageexpanding the right to organize and join a labor union, and enforcing labor standards to prevent violations, such as wage theft and employment discrimination.

Together, these policies will boost wages and increase job quality, increase competition and productivity, and drive broad-based economic growth. 

To learn more about how monopsony affects the U.S. labor market, see the presentation slides from the March 23 congressional briefing here. For a write-up of a previous "Econ 101" briefing, on the effects of federal tax changes, see here.

The post Understanding the economics of monopsony: How labor markets work under imperfect competition appeared first on Equitable Growth.