Curiosidades de la economía

lipstick effect n. During a recession, the tendency for consumers to purchase small, comforting items such as lipstick rather than large luxury items.

house money effect The premise that people are more willing to take risks with money they obtained easily or unexpectedly.
->people who have money in their pockets will choose the gamble; those who start with empty pockets will reject it.
—"A winning way with odds and evens," Financial Times, November 21, 1996

Goldilocks effect When something succeeds or prospers because it is neither too big nor too small.

Size does matter. Up to a certain point, the more widgets you produce, the cheaper each widget becomes. But you no longer have to be General Motors to reap economies of scale. Several recent studies suggest a Goldilocks effect: medium-sized companies enjoy the benefits of scale more than the big ones do.
—James Surowiecki, "The Goldilocks effect," The New Yorker, May 27, 2002

Conspicuous austerity n. 1. Spending large quantities of money on goods and services that convey an image of simplicity or austerity. 2. A lifestyle in which a person openly and deliberately uses goods and services that convey a lower socioeconomic status.

Example:Joan Kron is credited with coining the term in 1983, in her book "Home-Psych." It's partly about voluntary but expensive 'simplicity,' like people going to Buddhist retreats "where they give you no food, the surroundings are Spartan, they beat the daylights out of you with exercise and deep-tissue massages and they charge you a lot of money."
—Bill Dunn, "Reduced consumerism may be ephemeral change," Capital Times, January 8, 2002

snob effect : The desire to purchase something only because it is extremely expensive or extremely rare; the tendency for demand to increase along with the price of an item whenever that item is perceived to improve the social status of the consumer.

Example:

Custom-tailored products that cannot be mass-produced and things that are supposed to be hard to buy, such as Ferraris, can't be promoted by bandwagon effects. Such presumptive rarities flourish with snob effects, the phenomenon that a thing becomes more desirable because fewer people can afford it or can find one.
—Andrew Allentuck, "Jumping on the bandwagon," eBusiness Journal, May, 2000

Repercusión en los medios

Los siguientes medios se hicieron eco de la nota de alerta Diversidad en el coste laboral en España por sectores y CC.AA. Mejores salarios en la industria y mayor crecimiento en la construcción:

El Economista- China. "¡Ojo que vienen!"

China consolida su crecimiento: registra un repunte del 11,5% en su PIB del primer semestre

AFX | 8:13 - 19/07/2007 Actualizado: 9:09 - 19/07/07 Léelo aquí

La economía china registró de nuevo un crecimiento de dos cifras en el primer semestre del 2007 con un alza de su producto interior bruto (PIB) del 11,5% en términos anuales, según ha anunciado este jueves la oficina nacional de estadística (BNS).

Prueba de ese dinamismo es que las inversiones de capital fijo se elevaron un 25,9% en los seis primeros meses del año a 520.000 millones de euros.

"La inversión crece a un nivel elevado y progresa más rápido en el centro y el oeste del país", indicó la oficina.

Recalentamiento económico

Habida cuenta de que la inflación superó el objetivo anual del gobierno fijado en el 3% (3,2% en el primer semestre y 4,4% interanual en junio, según las cifras anunciadas este mismo día por la BNS), las autoridades tendrán que tomar medidas para evitar un recalentamiento de la economía.

"Seguiremos reforzando y mejorando las medidas macroeconómicas de control", ha declarado el portavoz de la BNS, Li Xiaochao, en una rueda de prensa.

Pekín ya adoptó varias decisiones en ese sentido en lo que va de año, como dos subidas del tipo de interés, cinco alzas de las reservas obligatorias de los bancos y medidas fiscales para intentar contener las exportaciones.

Revisión al alza del PIB

La semana pasada, las autoridades revisaron al alza la tasa de crecimiento del año 2006 hasta el 11,1%, frente al 10,7% indicado hasta entonces, es decir, un PIB de 21 billones de yuanes -unos 2,65 billones de dólares según el cambio medio del año pasado a 7,97 yuanes por dólar, lo que equivale a casi 2 billones de euros-.

Según los analistas, si China sigue con su crecimiento actual desbancará a Alemania como tercera economía mundial antes de acabar el 2007.

El País- Valores a examen. Comentad, ¿qué opinión os merece?

Telefónica, un buen momento para todo un clásico

Los analistas consideran el valor una buena apuesta para el segundo semestre

N. CANO - Madrid - 19/07/2007 Léelo aquí

Buena racha para Telefónica en Bolsa. En las últimas cinco jornadas, las acciones de la compañía presidida por Cesar Alierta se han revalorizado cerca del 4,8%, marcando máximos anuales y siendo uno de los principales apoyos del Ibex 35. Aunque cerró ayer con un ligero recorte del 0,4%, se mantuvo en los 17,35 euros, muy cerca de los 17,38 euros del 10 de mayo de 2001, su máximo de hace seis años y una cifra en la que se ha movido cómoda esta semana. Pero lo mejor puede estar por llegar. Los analistas coinciden en que, tras la ruptura de los 17,15 euros, se inicia un nuevo tramo alcista que la colocaría en torno a los 19 euros.

The economist- Europa del Este

Worrying about a crash

Jul 5th 2007 | RIGA
From The Economist print edition Léelo aquí

East European economies are still powering along—but the region is ill-prepared if the weather turns nasty

Peter Schrank

IMAGINE some souped-up old bangers driven confidently but not expertly on a smooth road in fine weather. That is the economic picture of the ten east European countries that are now in the European Union. If the road gets wet or slippery, bad brakes and bald tyres make a crash, even a pile-up, horribly likely.

The country that most troubles outsiders is Latvia. It has a whopping current-account deficit: some 21% of GDP in 2006, and bigger still so far this year. That reflects soaring consumption and household debt, financed mainly by foreign-owned banks. Wages are rocketing—up by a third year-on-year. Inflation is over 8%.

This points to a need for tough restraining measures. But the currency, the lats, is pegged to the euro, so the central bank's ability to raise interest rates is constrained. Although the IMF issued a sharp warning in May about the need for a fiscal squeeze, the government is keener on harvesting the dividends of double-digit GDP growth than on acting to avert the risk of a crash.

Aware of the dangers, the banks, mainly Swedish-owned, are reining in lending. Their share prices wobbled during a brief financial crisis in February. Prudent behaviour by the banks may amount to a monetary tightening on its own. Other modest measures include making tax declarations a mandatory part of loan applications, deterring those with undeclared wealth. A speculative attack on the lats may tempt some, but it is tricky to organise in Latvia's puny financial markets.

Latvia is a financial pipsqueak, with only 0.2% of the euro area's GDP. If it does run off the road—for example, if it is forced to unpeg its currency—the main victims will be local borrowers and foreigners who have lent to them (in theory, but probably not in practice, Western banks could refuse to bail out local subsidiaries, even if their loan books shrivelled). Any crash in the Baltics is unlikely to affect outsiders' views of other regional economies. The likeliest route for contagion would be to next-door Estonia. It is also overheating, but its somewhat more responsible government has a modest budget surplus.

The other early candidate for a crash has long been Hungary, which admitted last year that it had been running a budget deficit of 10% of GDP. But a combination of tax rises and modest spending cuts has trimmed the deficit. Exports and industrial production have risen. The central bank has begun to cut interest rates. Hungary has been “disgustingly lucky”, says Juliet Sampson of HSBC, a bank.

Even if a pile-up is avoided, overheating is still undesirable. As euro members like Portugal have found, a boom stoked by low interest rates and a fixed exchange rate can lead to a long period of uncompetitiveness and slow growth. Except for Slovenia, which is now in, none of the east European countries is likely to join the euro for some time—but they have mostly been able to borrow as cheaply as if they were already members.

So how to cool things down? For countries that can do it, keeping their interest rates above the euro's and letting their currencies appreciate helps. So does bringing in foreign workers from places such as Ukraine in order to reduce upward wage pressures. Slovakia is a prime example of how to pull off both tricks.

The only long-term answer is not to add coolant or to drive more slowly, but to fix up the car. Unfortunately the process of structural reform in the region has largely stopped. Fast growth in tax revenues plus weak political leadership makes for less pressure to get a grip on public finances. Poland and Romania, in particular, have proved alarmingly ready to make expensive spending pledges for political reasons.

A new World Bank study of public spending (see chart below) highlights the bad bargain that the region's taxpayers are getting. Almost everywhere, public spending is higher than it should be for middle-income developing economies. In Albania, the study finds that overstaffing, poor debt collection and wasteful management at the state-run water industry alone costs 1% of GDP. Despite the spread of flat taxes, the “tax wedge”, which includes social-security and other charges, can be as much as 40% of wages.

Changing this is a political matter, not an economic one. But the evidence is that voters do not much like reform. Reforming governments have usually lost the next elections. A report from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development shows that, in most of the region, only minorities of voters, and sometimes not even a plurality, support both a democracy and a market economy (many choose the “don't care” option instead).

Nor is there any obvious punishment for a failure to reform. Romania and Bulgaria have been backsliding ever since they joined the EU in January, and yet there have been only mild complaints from Brussels, which has lost the leverage that it had before the two countries' entry. Capital markets are accommodating too. The lesson that other countries take from Hungary's financial shenanigans is that it is possible to spend like crazy to win an election and then sober up afterwards.

That will change when global conditions make growth a hard scrabble, rather than a bonanza, and borrowing money means dealing with flinty-eyed sceptics, not rosy-eyed thrill-seekers. The politicians may then have to concentrate on the real sources of competitiveness: brains, hard work and clean government.

The economist- ¿Podrá recuperarse Europa?

Can Europe's recovery last?

Jul 12th 2007 From The Economist print edition. Léelo aquí

Only if its governments take advantage of sunnier times to make deeper reforms

Peter Schrank

AS EVERY actor knows, it is easy to be typecast. The role assigned to Europe for the past decade has been that of sclerotic under-achiever: a slow-growing, work-shy and ageing continent that is destined to be left behind by the United States, China and India. Unnoticed by the audience, Europe, under new political leadership first in Germany and Italy and now in France and Britain, has changed the plot. Since the end of 2006 euro-area GDP has outpaced America's: in 2007, it should grow by 2.7%, ahead of both America and Japan. The euro is at new highs against the dollar and the yen. Unemployment has fallen to 7%, the lowest since the euro started life in 1999.

The transformation has been most remarkable in Germany, the biggest European economy, once tarred as “the sick man of Europe”. From 1995 to 2005 German GDP grew at an average of only 1.4% a year. But in the first quarter of 2007 it expanded more than twice as fast, despite a large rise in value-added tax. The 2004 reforms in labour markets and welfare made by the previous government under Gerhard Schröder are bearing fruit. On international definitions, unemployment is down to 6.4%, not much above the level in Britain. German business is doing spectacularly well: the country is again the world's biggest exporter, profits are at a record, competitiveness has improved sharply (see article).

Where Germany leads, the rest of Europe follows. In truth the picture of an entire continent in a slump was always distorted. Several countries in Europe have been doing well for some years. Britain and Spain have grown consistently. Ireland has produced the nearest thing to an economic miracle outside Asia; smaller east European economies are seeking to emulate it. Scandinavia boasts three countries that top most league tables for competitiveness. The truly troubled economies of Europe were always the core euro-area ones: Germany, France and Italy. Now that Germany has picked up speed, the other two are improving too. The new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is promising to boost growth. Some Europeans may be tempted to conclude that their economic problems are behind them, their structural faults have been put right—and there is no need for more painful reforms.

The turn of the cycle

Such a conclusion would be wrong on pretty much every count. Yes, there have been structural improvements in the core euro area, especially Germany. But much of the recovery is really cyclical. When the global economy is registering a fourth successive year of near-5% growth, it would be surprising if the world's biggest exporter did not benefit; indeed, growth of 3% seems rather modest. Moreover, much of Germany's renewed vigour reflects stringent control of real wages, which has secured a fall in unit labour costs when they have been rising elsewhere. Yet merely squeezing pay to gain competitiveness is not a long-term solution.

The gain also comes at the expense of other euro-area countries, such as France, Italy and Spain. This creates tensions of its own, much on display this week when the hyperactive Mr Sarkozy dropped in to a meeting of euro-area finance ministers in Brussels. He announced that France might again flout the euro-area stability pact's restrictions on budget deficits, and repeated his previous complaints about the strength of the euro and the tight monetary policy of the European Central Bank. He ran into a stony hostility, notably from the Dutch but also from the Germans (see article). The French president has similarly been to the fore in attacking European Union competition rules and talking up the causes of industrial policy and economic patriotism.

A myth, Mr Sarkozy, and you know it

The charitable explanation for this nonsense is that laying into Brussels is a way of diverting French voters from the genuine (and long overdue) reforms Mr Sarkozy is planning for the labour market, welfare and taxation. But his agenda seems also to be driven by a common belief in France (and in other parts of Europe) that the euro's macroeconomic management and the obsession in Brussels with pursuing pro-competitive reforms are to blame for the region's economic ills.

This is to get things entirely backwards. As is obvious from the divergent performance of individual countries, the euro area's troubles are not macroeconomic in nature. Rather they are microeconomic, reflecting the failure of several countries to reform rigid labour markets and overly regulated product markets. These countries have been suffering not from too much competition, but from too little: for too long, too many of their workers and producers have been sheltered from competition, fostering high costs and inefficiency.

Nor will partial reforms of the kind so far carried out be sufficient. This can best be seen in the labour market in Germany, which (like Italy's) has been only partly freed up. The result has been not just a welcome explosion of temporary and part-time jobs, but, more insidiously, the entrenchment of a two-tier labour market. Insiders have permanent, protected contracts; outsiders have short-term, unprotected ones. This will fuel resentment among outsiders (often the young or immigrants). It also threatens to introduce new rigidities into the wage-bargaining process, because insiders may feel sufficiently insulated to demand higher pay in the knowledge that any resultant job losses will fall on outsiders.

The unpalatable truth remains that Europe's economies need substantial further reform if they are to prosper in an ever more competitive, globalised environment. And the recent upturn may make it harder for political leaders to get their voters to understand this.

European countries that have introduced radical reforms have usually done so in times of serious economic crisis: Britain in 1979, the Netherlands in 1982, Ireland in 1987, Denmark, Finland and Sweden in the early 1990s. Yet as all these countries found, it is easier to change when times are good, not when they are bad. That is a lesson that Germans, French, Italians and other Europeans should ponder as they bask in today's sunshine.

Artículos para AGETT

AGETT.com Notas de Alerta

Aquí podéis encontrar los enlaces a los últimos artículos (notas de alerta) sobre el mercado laboral publicados en el servicio de estudios de AGETT (Asociación de Grandes ETTs):

-Diversidad en el coste laboral en España por sectores y CC.AA. Mejores salarios en la industria y mayor crecimiento en la construcción.


-Las ETTs ofrecen una incorporación más fácil al mercado laboral para los trabajadores menos cualificados aunque gestionan diferentes cualificaciones.

-Acceder al primer empleo será cada vez más difícil.

-Cómo está la Agenda de Lisboa y Plan Nacional de Reformas en 2007.