{"id":29855,"date":"2016-01-08T12:29:20","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T10:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/d66.nl\/vanmierlostichting\/archive\/on-the-horns-of-a-trilemma\/"},"modified":"2016-01-08T12:29:20","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T10:29:20","slug":"on-the-horns-of-a-trilemma","status":"publish","type":"archive","link":"https:\/\/d66.nl\/vanmierlostichting\/archive\/on-the-horns-of-a-trilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"On the horns of a trilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"Lees hier het pdf<\/a>\u00a0van dit artikel.<\/em>\n\nRising inequality is often attributed to the \u201cneoliberal model\u201d. And indeed, wage equality does not easily fit the liberal objectives of fiscal discipline and high levels of employment. What is the liberal way out of the \u201ctrilemma\u201d?<\/strong>\n\nBy Tom Papworth<\/strong>\n\nPoliticians of all persuasions are increasingly worried about rising income inequality and the extent to which growth is failing to benefit everybody within the economy. The concept of \u201cinclusive growth\u201d is built on a belief that growth should be \u201cshared\u201d, \u201cpro-poor\u201d, \u201cbroad-based across sectors\u201d and \u201cinclusive of the large part of the country\u2019s labor force\u201d (World Bank 2009). This presents particular challenges for liberals. Firstly, liberalism takes a generally positive view of economic growth, seeing it as a widely beneficial process emerging from the mutual gains from trade that result when individuals, guided by (enlightened) self-interest, collaborate and exchange. Narratives that suggest that growthcould be harmful to marginalised groups, or even that some groups could simply be left behind, are therefore disturbing for liberals. Secondly, typical responses to what might be termed \u201cexclusive growth\u201d tend to emanate from a familiar list of illiberal, anti-market, protectionist interventionists from both conservative and socialist traditions. Recommended responses tend to include punitive taxation, maximum wage legislation and even public ownership of whole industries, as well as more general opposition to trade, immigration and market relations.\n\nThis article will consider the challenges facing modern, developed economies, building on the analysis of Iversen and Wren (1998). They arguethat service-sector economies struggle to create sufficient high-wage service sector jobs, and that as a consequence they face a trilemma; governments are able to achieve up to two, but not all three, of the competing aims of job growth, income equality and budgetary restraint.\n\nGlobalisation<\/strong>\n\nExplanations for changes in employment, equality and fiscal conditions in the late twentieth century have usually centred on the impact of globalisation. However, globalisation primarily impacts the traded sector of the economy, which to a large extent is synonymous with manufacturing. In developed economies, the significance of manufacturing has fallen dramatically over the past half century. Figure 1 reproduces a chart from Pilat et al. (2006) showing the decline in the proportion of jobs in manufacturing in G7 countries. Every G7 country has seen a dramatic fall in the contribution that manufacturing makes to employment. This decline represents a combination of two factors: an absolute decline in the number of manufacturing workers in most OECD countries, and rapid employment growth in the services sector (W\u00f6lfl 2005).\n\nIt is important to note that this decline in manufacturing employment <\/em>has not been accompanied by a fall in manufacturing output. <\/em>In the UK, for example, output grew by about a quarter over the 25 years from 1980 despite a near halving of manufacturing employment. The key to this is the rising productivity of industrial workers, which has been aided by technological improvements\/ innovation. However, as Iversen and Wren (1998) describe the process, increased output leads eventually to market saturation and a shift of demand towards quality rather than quantity \u2013 rather than consumers demanding more <\/em>manufactured goods, they demand better <\/em>goods. They also increasingly shift demand to services. But as Baumol and Bowen (1966) argued, increasing productivity in the service sector is not nearly as easy. Many service sector jobs are resistant to productivity growth: innovation cannot increase the number of haircuts a barber can provide, or increase the rate at which care nurses help old people in and out of bed. Consequently, as economies become more service intensive it becomes harder to achieve the virtuous circle of increasing wages and prices. Real demand is increased only by reducing costs in the provision of services.\n\nThus increasing employment in the service sector is achieved only through creating additional, low-paid service sector jobs, which increases inequality. Conversely, wage equality is generally achieved through keeping unproductive workers out of employment altogether. For example, Belgium, Ireland, France, Luxembourg and Norway had the highest productivity levels in the OECD area in 2004, with levels at or above those of the United States (OECD, 2005). Yet all except Norway also had employment rates well below that of the us and indeed below the OECD average (OECD, undated).\n\nPublic sector jobs <\/strong>Governments have traditionally tried to square the circle through creating substantial numbers of relatively well-paid service sector jobs in the public sector. However, this has an inevitable impact upon the public finances. For example, the New Labour government in the UK increased public sector employment by 15.7% between 1997 and 2010 (Bach and Stroleny 2012) and the general government pay bill grew by 4\u20136% per annum in real terms from 1998 to 2006 (Bozio and Johnson 2010). Yet productivity in the public sector remained flat (Massey and Caul 2014) and from 2001 the UK ran a public sector deficit that meant that it underperformed comparable countries in a period when public sector debt was falling among most leading industrial nations (Chote et al 2010).\n\nIversen and Wren (1998) argue that the governments of modern, industrialised economies are therefore caught in a trilemma: they cannot achieve the three objectives of high employment,income equality and fiscal restraint simultaneously.\n