How much economics can you get out of a single graph? Here's is my entry: The Economist has a chart for salary expectations of graduates. Not many surprises there - Swiss grads expect more than those in Poland. More surprising - women expect less than men, but hey, they do earn less. They are just realistic. Then my eye wandered to the entries for two countries close to my heart - Germany and Spain. First of all, the Spanish graduates all expected starting salaries LOWER than the national average salary. Pretty much everywhere else, that's not the case. Note that educational attainment has risen quite quickly in Spain in recent decades, from a low base. That means that the average university graduate is comparing himself with a salary paid to people whose educational attainment is really quite low -- and they still think (and probably will) earn much less. The college premium? None in Spain. Truth be told, much of the university education here has consisted in handing out pieces of paper to people who sat in overcrowded lecture theatres long enough to lower the reported unemployment rate. There they were often taught by people with a degree from the university where they are now teaching [no, that's not UPF economics - we never hire our own doctoral students, and class sizes here are small]. So education mostly doesn't pay. That mainly because it's lousy on average, and the selectivity of higher education is so low that there is no premium in Spain.
Then I looked at the national wage rates for Germany and Spain -- the difference is factor 2! Now, Germans are more productive per head (and much more productive per hour - working hours in Spain are pretty long). But the ratio is off. A quick check confirms what I remembered: Spain is about 3/4 as productive per head as Germany, and not 1/2. That's another way of saying that, per unit of output, Spaniards earn less. How come? Normally, you would think that having low wages relative to output would be great for growth - profits should be high, and growth should take off. But not so fast.
The reason why the pay difference is large probably reflects two things: First of all, there are lots of side payments in small-and-medium firms that are not reported ("the envelope" with black money). This is a major source of inefficiency. The big firms can't and won't engage in this practice, which means that their wage costs are higher -- to get workers, they have to fork out more. The uneven tax cheating is driving employment into the inefficient small firms. Second, if the ratio of wages to output is lower than in, say, Germany, then someone must be getting the rest. Normally, that would be profits. Part of it is, I am sure, just payments to fixed factors of production, like rent... those silly prices for land, again. Finally, returns to entrepreneurs and the self-employed may be higher, but possibly not for the reasons we might like. Entry regulation etc has something to do with it. Spain is not exactly home to a large number of small + medium, world-beating companies. Most produce for the home or regional market. The reason why they are in business at all is that they know how to navigate the local forest of regulation and connections - and not higher efficiency. The political cast conspires to keep competition out, from the national level down. The country has one of Europe's most uncompetitive phone- and internet-markets (all those well-connected board members at Telefonica); there is a blatant breaking of EU competition rules when it comes to takeovers (remember EON's attempt to buy a utility in Spain?), etc. All of this shows up as profits somewhere, but it isn't exactly good for the economic performance of the country. This also suggests that "pay restraint" isn't the first thing to think about when it comes to restoring the country's economic vigor.
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