The Jobless Recovery - Now,
The Jobless Recovery - Now, as far as I'm concerned, the moment I got a long-term contract, the recovery was a jobful one.
Of course, I'm not the entire measure of the economy...
...well, actually, as far as life in the Berg household goes, yes, I am. The Clinton recession ended in November of '03. But for the rest of the households in this country, the mileage may vary. And the conventional wisdom is that this recovery is "jobless".
Fortunately, the Economist has the latest
...“offshoring” is certainly having an effect on some white-collar jobs that have hitherto been safe from foreign competition. But how big is it, really? The best-known report, by Forrester Research, a consultancy, guesses that 3.3m American service-industry jobs will have gone overseas by 2015—barely noticeable when you think about the 7m-8m lost every quarter through job-churning. And the bulk of these exports will not be the high-flying jobs of IT consultants, but the mind-numbing functions of code-writing.
Meanwhile, there is another side to the ledger. Instead of focusing on jobs lost to the globalisation of information technology, Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington looks at globalisation's power to reduce prices and so help spread new technology, new practices and job-creating investment through the economy.
She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production—all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance—was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.
Worth a read.
(Via Instapundit)
Posted by Mitch at
February 23, 2004 05:58 AM
