>Scott in re: Henwood on job losses.
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>mbs
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>Here's one basic argument that needs to be made. Its foolish to look at
>mfg. employment changes since 1993 or 1994. That was the bottom of a
>recession.
The bottom of the recession was March 1991. The employment trough overall was February 1992.
> The US has lost more than 1.1 million mfg. jobs since the
>last cyclical peak in 1989, as shown in the attached table from the BLS.
Here are some interesting points in the manufacturing employment history.
last peak 3/89 19,483
last trough 7/93 18,030
NAFTA 1/94 18,155
recent peak 3/98 18,883
latest 4/00 18,372
So of that 1.1 million loss, 1.4 million occurred between 1989 and 1993. We're still over 300k above the 7/93 trough. Between NAFTA taking effect and the recent 1998 peak, over 700k manufacturing jobs were added. What's happened since is almost certainly the result of the Asian crisis, not NAFTA - which is to say not enough trade, not too much.
>Another point: we got lucky with NAFTA, which was put into effect just
>as we were coming out of the recession. Output and employment growth
>from domestic sources (C+I) more than offset losses on trade (X-M).
I really wonder about this X-M technique. If exports - or trade in general - make growth higher than it would have been in the absence of exports - or trade - then you can't say that trade resulted in a net loss of jobs. Nor can you say antyhing about the relatlve quality of jobs lost and/or gained through trade. I'm no econometrician, but this seems like a pretty crude technique to me.
Doug