From HVRDS: Employment, Industrialization and Development Models

Here's an analytical gem from fellow mlq3 commenter hvrds which i would like to cut and paste here:

"Government tells us that a little over half of the labor force actually earns a wage or salary. The other half are self-employed or unpaid family workers. We massacre the definition of employed in this country to be able to ape the economic accounting construct of advanced mechanized integrated industrial economies.We are told to use to this type of measurements which really is a joke.

Labor force – population 15 years old and over, whether employed or unemployed, who contribute to the production of goods and services in the country. 36M +

Employed – persons in the labor force who are reported at work or with a job or business although not at work during the reference week.

Unemployed* – persons in the labor force who did not work or had no job/business during the reference week and were reported looking and available for work.

Underemployed - employed persons who desire to have additional hours of work in their present job or in a additional job, or to have a new job with longer working hours.

Visibly Underemployed – employed persons who work for less than 40 hours during the reference week and still want additional hours of work.

Invisibly Underemployed – employed persons who work for 40 hours or more during the reference week and still want additional hours of work.

*Persons not looking or who have given up looking for work are not considered unemployed. They are considered voluntarily unemployed. They are not counted at all.

In the more developed industrial economies the description for those who are employed are as follows:

Non-farm payroll workers (full time, part time and temporary) Farm payrolls and government payroll’s (is distinguished from the private sector.)

Self -employed and family owned enterprises are not considered in the same classification as employed.

In the Philippines the term employed is stretched to include this. Tenant farmers(sharecropers),coastal fisherman are all considered employed under this defintion.

Having said that one should recall the words of Adam Smith who reminds us that:

“Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed and clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”

Henry Sy, the Tantocos and the Ayalas have nothing to do with farming nor sewing nor building. The indolent Filipino that I read about in some comments feed, cloth shelter and wipe’s the ass for some of you.

Industrial economies in food production alone through continuing advances in technology have multiplied the productive capacites of land, labor. In the past a 4-6-fold return on seed planted for wheat was considered normal, then a 10-fold return was considered exceptional Today it is 40-45 fold and higher. That is what productivity through a carbon based industrialization has wrought. (man made fertilizers are carbon based)The West subsidizes this production to insure stable prices and price stability. After all food is the currency of currencies. This revoltuion in agriculture in conjunction with the industrial revolution (you remember this) moved most people into cities.

The issue of hunger is prevalent simply because the economic model we persist in using is still the same installed by the colonizers.

It is interersting that a lot of sup[posedly knowledgeable people support the views of Washington Sycip about the drawbacks of democracy pointing to the authoritrian forms of our neighbors. he forgets to point out this one important fact. The chopsticks economies he refers to have a long history of formal national fedual structures in place. But they all followed a national mercantilist dirigist economic paradigm along the same lines as proposed by the then father of U.S. industrial mercantilism Alexander Hamilton.

If we had followed this paradigm at the end of the second world war then we would have destroyed the landlordism in the country by force and installed a genuine agrarian reform program that means that there would have been no parity rights for the Americans and all multinational corporations would have been nationalized and there would have been no Washington Sycip. That is what Japan, South Korea, PRC and Taiwan did. It is precisely Washington Sycip who benefitted from the policy framework of the Washington Consensus. His major clients are the multinationals who would have been tossed out until they are invited in like the PRC under the framework of a national dirigist economic paradigm. He has become rich though the policy of debasing the national currency. - hvrds March 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm"

It's an empirical fact that the former colonies of Japan have done better than former American colonies in terms of economic growth. Will blog more about this in the future.