Comment by Riaz Haq on February 16, 2015 at 1:29pm

In a recently released working paper, we have analyzed data on manufacturing employment and output levels from developing and developed countries.  We show that historical manufacturing employment levels are much better predictors of subsequent prosperity than historical manufacturing output levels. Unfortunately, we also find that late industrializers are likely to face significant difficulty achieving high manufacturing employment shares, even if they are successful in spurring high levels of manufacturing activity. Therefore, while manufacturing jobs are key, it will be difficult for today’s late industrializers to replicate past success with development through manufacturing job creation.

A long tradition in development economics treats manufacturing as special.  Some of the development benefits the sector provides rely on large and growing numbers of manufacturing jobs, not just rising levels of manufacturing output. Labor productivity in manufacturing converges rapidly towards international norms. This gives aggregate productivity a bigger boost; the larger the share of the workforce that is in manufacturing, the greater the boost. The more rapid the manufacturing employment growth, the faster workers move out of low-productivity, low-wage agriculture and traditional services.

Unfortunately, cross-country analysis of the connections between manufacturing employment and levels of development has been restricted to OECD countries. This matters because many developing country governments have large programs to stimulate manufacturing activity, on the understanding that jobs and higher incomes will follow.  Ambitious job targets are announced – such as 100 million new manufacturing jobs by 2022 in India. These are typically justified with reference to the experiences of earlier industrializers, like Korea and Taiwan.  Public budgets, land and labor regulations, and even education policy are being modified to pursue these manufacturing jobs.  We can see why developing countries want these manufacturing jobs: our data show that a country’s peak manufacturing employment share between 1970 and 2010 rather than is its peak manufacturing output share, is a much better predictor of its average per capita GDP in 2005-2010.  Controlling for peak manufacturing employment shares and the date that manufacturing activity peaked, peak output shares are insignificant predictors of subsequent prosperity.  This suggests that manufacturing output matters for prosperity only insofar as it comes with jobs. Moreover, we show that every country that is rich today, by any reasonable standard, had more than an 18-20% manufacturing employment share sometime since 1970.

It is important to note that industrial activity typically grows with income in poorer countries, peaks, and then falls with income and wages in richer (deindustrializing) countries.  There are two reasons we think that manufacturing employment-led development is becoming more challenging.

1. Labor productivity has risen faster in manufacturing than in the wider economy. Higher levels of manufacturing output are now compatible with lower levels of manufacturing employment. Figure 1 confirms this, showing that peak manufacturing employment shares have fallen over time. Peak output shares have not.

Figure 1: Manufacturing Employment Shares Have Declined, Output Shares Have Not

2.Manufacturing activity is now more apt to leave for other countries as labor costs rise. Therefore  deindustrialization kicks in at lower income levels. Moreover, this premature deindustrialization is more apparent in employment than in output data. Output can be sustained in the face of rising labor costs by replacing workers with machinery.[1]

Countries still industrialize and then deindustrialize as they become richer.  However, industrial employment shares for today’s late industrializers such as China, India and Bangladesh are all below 16%, and on today’s trends seem unlikely to rise much further. Moreover, the per capita income levels at which deindustrialization kicks in have fallen from $34,000 in 1970 to around $9,000 in 2010.

These results urge a balanced approach to industrialization. They confirm that industrialization matters – when it brings jobs; but they also confirm that this is less and less likely to happen. Governments must not neglect manufacturing. Nor can they rely as heavily on it as they once did.

[1] Arvind Subramaniam and Amrit Amirapu show similar trends in industrial (manufacturing plus mining, utilities and construction) employment using repeated cross-sections of countries.

This post first appeared on The World Bank’s Jobs & Development Blog. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

 

https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/02/should-emerging-markets-still-fo...

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 26, 2015 at 4:52pm

Journalist Robert D. Kaplan thinks that what is wrong with the Middle East is a lack of imperialism, and he urges that it be brought back. It is how, he says, most of the world has been ruled by “default.” This argument is so ahistorical and wrong-headed that it takes the breath away.

First of all, “imperialism” is an imprecise term. Kaplan is trying to sweep up different kinds of empire under one rubric. Until the early twentieth century, most people in the Middle East admittedly accepted the Ottoman Empire, which was Muslim-ruled and made minimal economic demands on them while offering minimal governance. But it was precisely at that point when the Ottomans began building railroads to deliver garrisons to the provinces and introducing modern, more intrusive bureaucracy that they began facing opposition from local elites like the Hashemite rulers of Mecca in the Hejaz. The rise of nationalism was also fatal to empire, whether Ottoman or any other sort.

Capitalist economic imperialism of the European sort is a new phenomenon in world history, and proved far less welcome in the Middle East than the decentralized Ottoman methods of governance. The European empires in Asia and Africa were not into it for their subjects’ health. Historians estimate that in the early nineteenth century, the colonized territories provided 15 percent of the metropole’s income, a margin that may well have helped technological and economic advances in Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, East Indies (Indonesian) rubber and petroleum provided as much as 25 percent of the Netherlands’ gross national product. That is to say, the Dutch stole billions of dollars from the Indonesians. European imperialism was brutal. European overlords worked plantation laborers to death. Since the foreigners were not liked, it was necessary occasionally to massacre the locals. The German army practiced with machine guns on primitively armed Namibian tribes as a prelude to the slaughter of World War I in Europe itself. Imperial archivists usually destroyed the documents that witnessed the viciousness and genocidal character of European economic imperialism.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/208161/whats-wrong-robert-kaplans-nos...

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 10, 2017 at 8:12am

#Pakistan Sees Bigger #LNG Profile; Imports to Surge From 4.5 Million Tons in 2016 to 30 Million Tons by 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/07/10/business/10reuters-pakis...

Pakistan says it could become one of the world's top-five buyers of liquefied natural gas (LNG), with Petroleum Minister Shahid Abbasi predicting imports could jump more than fivefold as private companies build new LNG terminals.

Outlining Pakistan's ambitious plans - which, if fully implemented, could shake up the global LNG market - Abbasi told Reuters that imports could top 30 million tonnes by 2022, up from just 4.5 million tonnes currently.

Cheaper than fuel oil and cleaner burning than coal, LNG suits emerging economies seeking to bridge electricity shortfalls and support growth on tight budgets.

(For a graphic on LNG market share by region click http://reut.rs/2uGUu9X)

"Within five years, I don't see any reason why we should not be beyond 30 million tonnes (in annual LNG imports). We will be one of the top five markets in the world," Abbasi said.

That kind of jump would represent one of the fastest growth stories in the energy industry, comparable to what China has done in many commodities - but there are doubts whether Pakistan can achieve its ambitions, given the complexity and cost of expansion projects.

"It's always possible, but seems very difficult as they will need much more (regasification) capacity and downstream pipeline capacity," said Trevor Sikorski at Energy Aspects, a London-based industry market researcher. "There are infrastructural issues and financial issues."

"Still, it is one of the key LNG growth markets, and its demand will help tighten up the market that has threatened to lurch into over supply."

Abbasi said no one took Pakistan seriously after a decade of botched attempts to bring LNG to the country, but this has changed with the construction of new LNG terminals and gas plants. He said foreign suppliers are now arriving in Pakistan - where energy shortages have prompted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to promise he'll end the country's frequent blackouts.

"Before, we used to go out to talk to LNG suppliers. Now they're coming to us," Abbasi said.

"(LNG) is really what has saved the whole energy system. It has been a huge success in Pakistan and it will continue," he said after Sharif on Friday inaugurated a new Chinese-built LNG power plant that uses General Electric turbines.

GETTING CONNECTED

Pakistan built its first LNG terminal in 2015 and, after some delays, a second terminal is due to come online in October, doubling annual import capacity to about 9 million tonnes.

A consortium of Exxon Mobil, Total, Mitsubishi, Qatar Petroleum and Norway's Hoegh is expected to decide by September whether to build a third LNG terminal for about $700 million, Abbasi said.

Pakistan has dropped plans to finance up to two more terminals, as private companies have said they would finance these themselves and use Pakistan's existing gas network to sell directly to consumers.

"That's been the real success and that's where the growth will come from," Abbasi said, adding that about 10 million homes are linked to gas connections in Pakistan - a nation of around 200 million.

"In the last four years, we would have added two million additional connections. We are really ramping that up."

If Pakistan achieves its ambitious development goals, it could significantly erode market oversupply, which has helped pull down Asian LNG spot prices by more than 70 percent since 2014 to around $5 per million British thermal units (mmBtu).

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 8, 2018 at 7:23am

Height, lifespan, GDP: Humanity has stagnated for most of its history

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/height-lifespan-gdp-humanity...

Measuring economic growth is difficult, especially for periods for which little information is available. However, harmonized national accounts were set up in most countries after World War II, and they provide different ways to measure aggregate production, either through summing the added values of all resident production sectors, or through summing all the incomes distributed by those sectors. Based on a broad set of historical studies, Maddison (2003)reconstructed income per capita data over the past two centuries, and added some point estimates for earlier periods (in 1 Common Era (CE), 1000 CE, 1500 CE, 1600 CE and 1700 CE). Such estimates often require educated guesses on unobservable trends, but they nonetheless show the best information given what is known at one point in time.

Recently, Bolt and van Zanden, (2013) have revised and complemented Maddison’s work with the “Maddison project”), and some of the findings are striking.

Over the past millennium, income per capita in the selected countries has increased 32-fold, from 717 US dollars per person per year around the year 1000 to 23,086 dollars in 2010. This contrasts sharply with the previous millennia, when there was almost no advance in income per capita. The figure shows that it started rising and accelerating around the year 1820 and it has sustained a steady rate of increase over the last two centuries. One of the main challenges for growth theory is to understand this transition from stagnation to growth and in particular to identify the main factor(s) that triggered the take-off.

Is the finding that there was stagnation in the standard of living until 1820 truly robust? This claim is particularly important given that mankind experienced significant technological improvements that would have been expected to increase productivity and income per person, from the Neolithic revolution to the invention of the printing press.

Two facts corroborate the idea that there was indeed stagnation over the most part of human history: first, estimates of longevity computed on specific groups across time and space do not display any trend before 1700 CE. For example, De la Croix and Licandro (2015) show using a long-running database of 300,000 famous people that there was no trend in mortality during most of human history, confirming the existence of a Malthusian stagnation epoch.

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Second, body height computed from skeletal remains does not display any trend either, while height is known to depend very much on nutrition when young (Koepke and Baten, 2005). This indicates that there was no systematic improvement in nutrition over time. One has to wait until the 19th century to observe a trend in height, as witnessed by the data of the Swedish army.

The three measures of standard of living proposed here – GDP per capita, height and lifespan – are therefore in the same direction: that of stagnation for most of human history. The economic growth that we now enjoy, with its positive effects on the standard of living but also its negative effects on the environment, is therefore an unprecedented and recent phenomenon on a historical scale.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 14, 2018 at 5:04pm

Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the industrial revolution re-configured global economic and political power. As machines in Manchester began to spin the bulk of global textile production, within decades, India went from the world’s top textile exporter to a net importer. Between 1750 and 1900, India’s share of global industrial production slumped from 25% to 2%. It was not just because of western command over science and technology. It owed as much to political power and exploitative economic and trade policies. The impact of that shift – let us call it the historic ‘Manchester moment’ – still significantly determines where India stands vis-a-vis the developed world. India continues to regret missing out on the industrial revolution in time.

It is ironical then that we may right now similarly be losing out on another revolution. This contemporary ‘Manchester moment’ is about digital technologies and digital economy. As industrial revolution automated mechanical power, digital revolution is about automation of intelligence. Both represent fundamental shifts in human affairs. The digital revolution will as thoroughly transform our economic, social and political organisation as did industrial revolution.

This tragedy is unfolding right in front of our eyes, in a nation supposed to be in good political and economic control of itself. It also has sufficient basic competencies in digital technologies and conducting modern business. As it was in 18th-19th centuries, India’s failure is primarily political.

Missing the digital revolution

A decade or so ago, China trailed India in terms of IT or software technologies. How has China then suddenly become a digital super-power, posing a challenge even to the US? Digital technologies build over and subsume traditional IT and software, but are centrally about next-generation data-based systems.

It is simple. Just examine where in China (or US) all the cutting edge development of digital technologies – like artificial intelligence (AI), Interent-of-Things and blockchain – takes place. It is within super-large domestically-owned digital ecosystems like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Didi. (In the US, these are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc). Unlike industrial technologies, digital ones are socially-iterative technologies that develop in real-world social and business settings, and not so much in laboratories. Innovating start-ups too get routinely bought and integrated into these ecosystems.

Over the last decade, China created ideal conditions for development of such large domestically-owned digital ecosystems, which catapulted China to global digital leadership. Both Chinese and US governments devote considerable public funds to partner with their private digital ecosystems for digital R&D.

And India? It first allowed Amazon to dump billions of dollars to close in on the domestic e-commerce market leader Flipkart. Not only were many other Indian e-commerce platforms suffocated in the process, domestic leaders like Flipkart had to off-load considerable equity abroad to obtain capital for matching Amazon’s cash burn. And now, most unthinkably, India is ready to sell its top e-commerce platform Flipkart to Walmart. Very soon, India’s two largest digital ecosystems will be foreign-controlled.

It is difficult to understand why India is inviting foreign corporations to own its digital ecosystems that are epicentres both of digital economy and development and control of digital technologies. It is difficult to think of a quicker path to total digital dependency.

Despite what most people think, digital platforms aren’t just ‘more efficient’ marketplaces. They are monopolistic intelligent agents that reorganise and control whole sectors, as they form backward and forward linkages – from manufacturing, inventory management and logistics, to payment and delivery. 

https://thewire.in/economy/does-flipkarts-sale-represent-a-manchest...

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 12, 2020 at 9:39pm

Pakistan Decides Against New Coal-fired Power

By 2030, Khan said, 60% of all energy produced in Pakistan will be clean and obtained through renewable resources, while 30% of all vehicles will run on electricity.

https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/pakistan-decides-against...


Khan’s government, which took power more than two years ago, has also undertaken a countrywide reforestation campaign to plant more than 3 billion trees by mid-2023 to mitigate the effects of climate change. The massive program, dubbed the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, went into effect last year, and officials say it has planted more than 500 million saplings across Pakistan.

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