On Jan 16, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>> [this bounced because the whole article was appended, bringing the
>> length of the post to 50k, which is just too long -
>
> No it's not - if your only rebuttal is to refer to the Conference
> Board.
> Do I sense here a reluctance to let loyal LBO comrades have a little
> fresh air from an alternative source of poli-econ, dear Doug? :-)
A couple of points. The Conference Board is a reputable source, your scorn aside. They do these stats in partnership with Angus Maddison's posse at the University of Groningen. The ILO uses them in their annual Key Indicators of the Labor Market.
And you snipped the quote in a tendentious way. The next sentences: "Total regular (formal and informal) wage employment remained basically unchanged over this period, registering a zero average rate of growth. Only irregular employment grew, increasing at an annual average rate of 18.5 percent." But this contradicts the evidence of their own table 4, which reports raw numbers, but not the percentages I've calculated below:
TF -43% EF +1506 EP +3233 ES + 285 IRR + 523 total + 50
[key: "TF is employment in traditional formal enterprises (state and collective enterprises), EF is employment in emerging formal enterprises (cooperative enterprises, joint ownership enterprises, limited liability corporations, shareholding corporations, and foreign-funded enterprises), EP is employment in small-scale private registered enterprises, ES is employment in individual registered businesses, and IRR is irregular employment."]
So what this is reporting is that employment in state enterprises declined sharply - which everyone knows already - but that other forms of employment (i.e., a growing capitalist labor market) rose dramatically. Total employment was up 50%, which is a long way from nothing.
Doug