Alemania: menos jerarquía y mas descentralización

Germany is Not Volkswagen

 

OCT 7, 2015

 

MUNICH – The Volkswagen scandal has raised questions about the German model of production. If the success of the company’s diesel-powered vehicles was due in part to fraudulent efforts to conceal the amount of harmful pollutants they emitted, will similar revelations at other companies call into questions the country’s transformation from “the sick man of Europe” to an export-driven economic powerhouse?

Fortunately, the answer is almost certainly no. Germany’s competitive advantage has less to do with chicanery than with how its firms are structured and the culture in which they operate. Germany’s leading car company is an exception to the manufacturing rules that have driven the country’s success, not an example of them.

Indeed, Germany’s success is frequently cited as a model that other countries should emulate, and rightly so. Since the beginning of the century, the country has grown to become one of the world’s leading exporters, outstripping all other major European countries. From 2000 to 2013, Germany’s exports grew by 154%, compared to 127% for Spain, 98% for the United Kingdom, 79% for France, and 72% for Italy.

The leading explanation for Germany’s impressive recent export performance is wage restraint. But, as a comparison with Spain reveals, faster wage growth elsewhere cannot be the entire story. To be sure, from 2000 to 2008, German wages increased by 19%, compared to 48% in Spain. But after the 2009 financial crisis, the roles were reversed. From 2009 to 2013, German nominal wages increased by more than 14%, compared to 4% in Spain. And yet, despite the more rapid rise in German wages, the country’s exports rebounded faster than Spain’s – or those of any other European Union country.

The most important factor behind Germany’s success is that the structure of its firms improves the quality of their products. German exporters are organized in a way that is less hierarchical and more decentralized than other European firms. This gives them several advantages. Decentralization enables employees at lower levels of the corporate hierarchy to devise and implement new ideas. As these employees are often closer to customers than those higher up, their collective knowledge about what the market is demanding is an important source of value.

Tapping this knowledge allows Germany to compete on quality, not price. Indeed, if wage restraint were the main factor in Germany’s success, it would be hard pressed to outperform French, Italian, British, and Spanish exporters, who compete mainly on price by offshoring production to low-wage countries. Instead, the German focus on quality allows its firms to charge higher prices and gain new customers. When exporters are asked to rank their products relative to a market average, 40% of German exporters classify their goods as top quality, while only 10% of French exporters do so.

Decentralized management has helped German exporters triple their share of the global market for top-quality goods compared to those firms that did not reorganize. Indeed, when I studied the top 1% of German exporters – the country’s export superstars – I found that they more than doubled their share of the world export market when they opted to decentralize their organizations.

This focus on quality could explain why German exports rebounded quickly after 2009, despite the rise in nominal wages. Quality makes exporters less vulnerable to changes in price – including those driven by rising wages. By contrast, those countries in which firms compete on price may have felt more pressure to move production abroad as domestic wages rose. Germany’s relative insensitivity to rising costs could also explain why its government is comfortable with a strong euro, whereas France and Italy have been calling on the European Central Bank to weaken the currency.

Volkswagen, it turns out, took a different approach from that of most other German firms. Rather than decentralizing power, CEO Martin Winterkorn sat at the head of a centralized, command-and-control organization in which he acted as a patriarch. His desire to take the company to the very top of the global car industry, surpassing Toyota, put enormous strain on his managers to deliver growth. The result – a decision to cheat on emissions tests – says less about Germany’s culture of manufacturing than about rot at the car company, beginning at the very top.

According to the World Value Survey, Germany is a high-trust society, in which citizens have confidence in one another’s behavior and act accordingly. Indeed, the lesson of the Volkswagen scandal is that this culture may be necessary for its export model to work. French and Italian exporters that introduced decentralized management did not increase their share of the global market for top-quality goods. The likely reason is that providing division managers with greater autonomy not only frees them up to respond to market demands; it also allows them to put their own career interests above the wellbeing of the firm.

If Germany is to maintain its economic dominance, it will have to do something far harder than keeping wages in check or restructuring hierarchies. It will have to ensure that the culture of integrity underlying its success remains unchanged by the pressures of global competition. 

Dalia Marin is Chair of International Economics at the University of Munich and a senior research fellow at Breugel, the Brussels-based economic think tank.

La Crisis de Representatividad de los Ciudadanos: ¿En nombre de quién negocian nuestros Gobiernos?

The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade

OCT 2, 2015

NEW YORK – As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems.

You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade.

New Zealand has threatened to walk away from the agreement over the way Canada and the US manage trade in dairy products. Australia is not happy with how the US and Mexico manage trade in sugar. And the US is not happy with how Japan manages trade in rice. These industries are backed by significant voting blocs in their respective countries. And they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the TPP would advance an agenda that actually runs counter to free trade.

For starters, consider what the agreement would do to expand intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies, as we learned from leaked versions of the negotiating text. Economic research clearly shows the argument that such intellectual property rights promote research to be weak at best. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary: When the Supreme Court invalidated Myriad’s patent on the BRCA gene, it led to a burst of innovation that resulted in better tests at lower costs. Indeed, provisions in the TPP would restrain open competition and raise prices for consumers in the US and around the world – anathema to free trade.

The TPP would manage trade in pharmaceuticals through a variety of seemingly arcane rule changes on issues such as “patent linkage,” “data exclusivity,” and “biologics.” The upshot is that pharmaceutical companies would effectively be allowed to extend – sometimes almost indefinitely – their monopolies on patented medicines, keep cheaper generics off the market, and block “biosimilar” competitors from introducing new medicines for years. That is how the TPP will manage trade for the pharmaceutical industry if the US gets its way.

Similarly, consider how the US hopes to use the TPP to manage trade for the tobacco industry. For decades, US-based tobacco companies have used foreign investor adjudication mechanisms created by agreements like the TPP to fight regulations intended to curb the public-health scourge of smoking. Under these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, foreign investors gain new rights to sue national governments in binding private arbitration for regulations they see as diminishing the expected profitability of their investments.

International corporate interests tout ISDS as necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking. But that argument is nonsense. The US is seeking the same mechanism in a similar mega-deal with the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, even though there is little question about the quality of Europe’s legal and judicial systems.

To be sure, investors – wherever they call home – deserve protection from expropriation or discriminatory regulations. But ISDS goes much further: The obligation to compensate investors for losses of expected profits can and has been applied even where rules are nondiscriminatory and profits are made from causing public harm.

The corporation formerly known as Philip Morris is currently prosecuting such cases against Australia and Uruguay (not a TPP partner) for requiring cigarettes to carry warning labels. Canada, under threat of a similar suit, backed down from introducing a similarly effective warning label a few years back.

Given the veil of secrecy surrounding the TPP negotiations, it is not clear whether tobacco will be excluded from some aspects of ISDS. Either way, the broader issue remains: Such provisions make it hard for governments to conduct their basic functions – protecting their citizens’ health and safety, ensuring economic stability, and safeguarding the environment.

Imagine what would have happened if these provisions had been in place when the lethal effects of asbestos were discovered. Rather than shutting down manufacturers and forcing them to compensate those who had been harmed, under ISDS, governments would have had to pay the manufacturers not to kill their citizens. Taxpayers would have been hit twice – first to pay for the health damage caused by asbestos, and then to compensate manufacturers for their lost profits when the government stepped in to regulate a dangerous product.

It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

 

Adam S. Hersh is Senior Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

La solución: recursos diplomáticos y financieros, crecimiento y empleo

The Middle East Meltdown and Global Risk

OCT 1, 2015

NEW YORK – Among today’s geopolitical risks, none is greater than the long arc of instability stretching from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With the Arab Spring an increasingly distant memory, the instability along this arc is deepening. Indeed, of the three initial Arab Spring countries, Libya has become a failed state, Egypt has returned to authoritarian rule, and Tunisia is being economically and politically destabilized by terrorist attacks.

The violence and instability of North Africa is now spreading into Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Sahel – one of the world’s poorest and most environmentally damaged regions – now gripped by jihadism, which is also seeping into the Horn of Africa to its east. And, as in Libya, civil wars are raging in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, all of which increasingly look like failed states.

The region’s turmoil (which the United States and its allies, in their pursuit of regime change in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, helped to fuel) is also undermining previously secure states. The influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq is destabilizing Jordan, Lebanon, and now even Turkey, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Meanwhile, with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians unresolved, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon represent a chronic threat of violent clashes with Israel.

In this fluid regional environment, a great proxy struggle for regional dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran is playing out violently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. And while the recent nuclear deal with Iran may reduce the proliferation risk, the lifting of economic sanctions on Iran will provide its leaders with more financial resources to support their Shia proxies. Further east, Afghanistan (where the resurgent Taliban could return to power) and Pakistan (where domestic Islamists pose a continued security threat) risk becoming semi-failed states.

And yet, remarkably, even as most of the region began to burn, oil prices collapsed. In the past, geopolitical instability in the region triggered three global recessions. The 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arab states caused an oil embargo that tripled prices and led to the stagflation (high unemployment plus inflation) of 1974-1975. The Iranian revolution of 1979 led to another embargo and price shock that triggered the global stagflation of 1980-1982. And the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990 led to another spike in oil prices that triggered the US and global recession of 1990-1991.

This time around, instability in the Middle East is far more severe and widespread. But there appears to be no “fear premium” on oil prices; on the contrary, oil prices have declined sharply since 2014. Why?

Perhaps the most important reason is that, unlike in the past, the turmoil in the Middle East has not caused a supply shock. Even in the parts of Iraq now controlled by the Islamic State, oil production continues, with output smuggled and sold in foreign markets. And the prospect that sanctions on Iran’s oil exports will be phased out implies significant inflows of foreign direct investment aimed at increasing production and export capacity.

Indeed, there is a global glut of oil. In North America, the shale-energy revolution in the US, Canada’s oil sands, and the prospect of more onshore and offshore oil production in Mexico (now that its energy sector is open to private and foreign investment) have made the continent less dependent on Middle East supplies. Moreover, South America holds vast hydrocarbon reserves, from Colombia all the way to Argentina, as does East Africa, from Kenya all the way to Mozambique.

With the US on the way to achieving energy independence, there is a risk that America and its Western allies will consider the Middle East less strategically important. That belief is wishful thinking: a burning Middle East can destabilize the world in many ways.

First, some of these conflicts may yet lead to an actual supply disruption, as in 1973, 1979, and 1990. 

Second, civil wars that turn millions of people into refugees will destabilize Europe economically and socially, which is bound to hit the global economy hard. And the economies and societies of frontline states like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, already under severe stress from absorbing millions of such refugees, face even greater risks.

Third, prolonged misery and hopelessness for millions of Arab young people will create a new generation of desperate jihadists who blame the West for their despair. Some will undoubtedly find their way to Europe and the US and stage terrorist attacks.

So, if the West ignores the Middle East or addresses the region’s problems only through military means (the US has spent $2 trillion in its Afghan and Iraqi wars, only to create more instability), rather than relying on diplomacy and financial resources to support growth and job creation, the region’s instability will only worsen. Such a choice would haunt the US and Europe – and thus the global economy – for decades to come.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics, was Senior Economist for International Affairs in the White House's Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration.