Minimum Wage Revised Part I: Theoretical Considerations

So the government has finally announced a new revision to Malaysia's minimum wage, two years after the last one. This time though, it's a whopping 25% increase to RM1,500, from the RM1,200 in 2020. Even after all these years (nine to be exact), the minimum wage continues to be the subject of a lot of arguments, so I thought I'd lay out some of the theory and Malaysian evidence (such as it is).

First of all, what we learned in Econ 101 is that when you establish a price above that of the market determined price, quantity supplied increases while quantity demanded decreases, and the market does not clear. In the context of labour, this implies higher unemployment, as more people are willing to work, but less employers can afford to take them on. But in empirical studies, this generally does not happen with the minimum wage. Why?

Threat or Help? Unskilled Immigrant Workers

The World Bank’s Malaysia Hub has a new brief on the effect of immigrant workers on productivity (excerpt):

Threat or Help? The Effects of Unskilled Immigrant Workers on National Productivity Growth
Sharmila Devadas

While unskilled immigrant workers have relatively low formal human capital, theory suggests that they can still contribute to productivity improvements by helping to increase efficiency and upgrading the skills of the native labor force. Empirical studies indicate that positive productivity effects do occur. This body of evidence does not provide a compelling argument for the closing of national borders to unskilled foreigners on economic grounds.

TL;DR version: The available evidence doesn’t support any negative impact on productivity, with some countries showing a positive impact. Note that this doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that reducing unskilled foreign workers will increase productivity, but it does make it unlikely.

Thinking About Labour Markets: Partial Equilibrium Fallacies

I think by this time we all know that empirically, a minimum wage doesn’t seem to have the negative effect on employment that conventional economic analysis says it does. The reason for that is the Econ 101 standby of analysing policy changes based on ceteris paribus – a partial equilibrium approach. Holding everything constant and changing just one variable is a very useful way of thinking about economic issues, but it risks missing out on real world implications when you forget that economic systems are, in fact, actually systems.

Raising The Foreign Worker Levy

The measure is on hold at the moment, but I want to put forward my thought process on the subject.

The main debating points are obvious - Malaysia relies too much on foreign workers, and they are generally paid wages below that of locals. The levies on foreign workers goes some way towards redressing that imbalance. On the other hand, raising the levy raises business costs and could force some industries to retrench without necessarily increasing demand for local labour, not to mention the impact on consumer inflation.

What most commentators might have missed is the existing discrepancy between employing a foreign worker relative to a Malaysian one, which boils down to one thing - EPF contributions.

TPPA and Jomo: The Academic Debate

Recently, KS Jomo has been in the headlines on his criticisms about the TPPA (e.g. here), or more specifically, the models that showed that the TPPA would be a net benefit to Malaysia (however marginal).

Some of his concerns I consider absolutely legitimate – assuming full employment and ignoring the impact on labour utilisation, labour income and inequality undermines the net-benefit conclusion of the CGE models most have used to analyse the TPPA. I also think that his call for the ongoing debate on the TPPA to encompass more than trade and include the socio-economic aspects should be supported.

Having said that, the GPAM model used by Prof Jomo and his colleagues has significant weaknesses too. Not least because the claim that Malaysia would see job losses, a reduction in the labour share of income, and a negative impact on GDP growth don’t stand up to much scrutiny.

I haven’t as yet tracked down the details of the GPAM model, but the paper analysing the TPPA (link here) treats Malaysia as part of a bloc that includes Singapore, Vietnam and Brunei as a single entity. How you can make any definite conclusions on a single country based on aggregated regional data is beyond me, especially since the raw data in the paper shows the labour income share dropping (pg 16; for the bloc as a whole), whereas Malaysia over the past decade and a half has seen the labour share of income stable and then rising.

I’m also really surprised that Jomo neglects the huge, huge impact that the TPPA will have on Malaysia’s labour laws, particularly in terms of freedom of association. For decades, trade unions have been highly restricted in how they can operate and to what degree (MTUC for example is registered as an NGO, and cannot operate as a trade union). That will change with the TPPA, and the resulting increase in labour bargaining power should, ceteris paribus, act to increase the labour share of income. That’s an institutional change that few if any models, trade or otherwise, incorporate in their framework.

For a more thorough critique of the GPAM model, try here. Prof Jamal notes the same problem as I did, and then some.

On a larger note, and this isn’t confined to the current topic, I wish more people would bother to read the damn academic papers before taking their conclusions at face value. It saves embarrassment in the long run.

The Impact of Foreign Labour

It’s no secret that Malaysia plays host to a lot of foreign labour; a lot of cheap foreign labour. Among the criticisms of this happenstance is that it takes away jobs from locals, reduces the wages locals can command, and stunts productivity growth.

Underlying these concerns is a false view of the economy, that labour competition between foreigners and locals are a zero-sum game. The first concern isn’t true – given our ridiculously low unemployment rate, there’s not a lot of evidence that foreigners have taken jobs away from locals. Culling foreign labour from Malaysia would only reduce output, and remove industries that would only exist (or exist as cheaply) from the availability of that foreign labour.

September 2013 Employment

There’s been a dearth of posts on this blog for the past couple of weeks, mainly for two reasons: first, I had some deadlines to meet last week, and second, I took my year end holiday a little early – four days exploring the Forbidden City and climbing the Great Wall of China, among other things. No email, no twitter, no calls from the office…bliss.

Now its back to covering the Malaysian economy, though things will be a little slow as I catch up on data releases, news developments and the backlog of messages and posted comments. My view of 3Q2013 GDP should be out tomorrow (it was released last Friday), but first up is something a little easier to look at.

Solving The Problem Of Imported Low Cost Labour

While I don’t always fully agree with some of Mr Menon’s views, I think this article is spot on (excerpt; emphasis added):

Can the new members of ASEAN catch-up without domestic polarisation?
Jayant Menon

ASEAN is divided. So how many ASEANs are there? Most separate the newer, less developed members (such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam; known as CLMV) from the older ones (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore; known as ASEAN6). As high-income countries, some would even put Singapore and Brunei in a separate, third category…

…In addition to market-oriented reforms, the fact that convergence is taking place should not be surprising. One reason to expect catch-up is the difference in the marginal efficiency of capital between poor and richer countries. With little access to capital, workers in poor countries have relatively low levels of productivity that can be raised substantially by increasing the amount of capital available to them by even small amounts…

Taking Part In The Brain Drain

I’ve always thought of the “brain drain” in primarily economic terms. Because of national and social barriers to labour mobility as well as search frictions for both employers and employees, earnings across countries vary widely even within the same industries.

Wages depend more on national level demand and supply, and international arbitrage of wages is at best imperfect. It’s easier for some companies to pull up sticks than to shift labour around the globe to where its needed.

Labour Bargaining And Wages

If you had a choice between two jobs with equal compensation, but one has higher bonuses and allowances but the other has higher base pay, which should you choose?

Take the one with higher basic salary (excerpt):

The intercept is negotiable, the slope is fixed

A new hire only gets one chance to negotiate: a brief window between the time that an offer is made and the time when that offer is accepted. Those initial terms and conditions determine the employee's salary for years to come - possibly the entire the duration of his or her time at the institution.

Monopsony In Labour Markets

I once characterised employer hiring as similar to a monopsonistic market – I’m somewhat chuffed that I’m hardly alone in thinking that way (excerpt):

Where's the monopsony?

...There is in economic theory a set of circumstances, however, under which an increase in the minimum wage might raise employment. If an employer has a market largely to itself--if it has monopsony power--then it will both pay its workers less than their productivity warrants and not hire enough workers to be at the most efficient level of employment. Raising the minimum wage would then both increase pay and induce more workers into the labor market, hence increasing employment. If government could nail the minimum wage to the marginal revenue product of the least productive workers, the minimum wage could produce a first-best outcome--one where pay and employment levels were efficient.

For the argument to work, the demand for labor needn't be perfectly monopsonistic, but rather less than perfectly competitive. The fact that wages and labor productivity seem to have less and less to do with each other is evidence that the demand for labor is not competitive, but it would be nice to have further, detailed evidence of the industrial organization of labor demand.

Economic Development A’la McDonalds

I promised to write a post on a Bloomberg article I read a couple of days ago, but was too busy to get down to it (you’ll see why in the next post).

But this article – really about the working paper its based on – is pretty fascinating (extract):

The Big Mac Theory of Development

It’s a question richer people have about their poorer neighbors: Why are they poor? Is it circumstances, or is it some kind of moral or intellectual failing? Is it that they never had a chance to cross from the wrong side to the right side of the tracks, or that they never had the motivation to cross? The subject colors thinking about international development as well. Is poverty in Africa and Asia the result of something about individual Kenyans or Pakistanis, or is it instead something about Kenya or Pakistan? Is it about the people, or the place?

A new paper by Princeton Economist Orley Ashenfelter for the National Bureau of Economic Research sheds some light on this debate. It compares the wages earned by staff working at McDonald’s (MCD) franchises around the world. Ashenfelter studies what McDonald’s employees earn against the cost of a Big Mac in their local franchise. The Big Mac is a standard product, and the way it’s made worldwide is highly standardized. The skill level involved in making it (such as it is) is the same everywhere. And yet, depending on where they live, crew members from all parts of the world earn dramatically different amounts in terms of Big Macs per hour…

The Global Skills Shortage

There were a couple of good, somewhat interrelated articles on Bloomberg this morning. First up, the global talent shortage (extract, emphasis added):

The Surprising Global Shortage of Skilled Workers

…Even as economists and politicians fret about the problem of global unemployment, those with the right résumés are in hot demand. That’s leading to talent shortages around the world, according to a survey released on May 29 by Milwaukee-based Manpower Group (MAN), one of the world’s largest temporary workers agencies.

All told, over one-third of the 38,000 companies Manpower surveyed earlier this year in 41 countries and territories reported that they were unable to find the workers they needed. That is 4 percentage points higher than it was in 2009, during the global financial crisis. The figure is still well below the 41 percent that reported shortages in 2007, before the crisis…

August 2011 Employment Report:

The employment report issued yesterday show the economy losing about 87k jobs in August:

That’s ok, because according to the report, 75k people left the labour force at the same time. It should be understood that we’re looking at a pretty strong seasonal effect here, due to Ramadhan – the same pattern consistently repeats over the past 2 years that we have data for.

Productivity Growing; Wages, Not So Much

From yesterday’s news (excerpt):

M'sia on track for 4.7% labour productivity growth

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia is on track to achieve the target of 4.7 per cent growth in labour productivity this year, said International Trade and Industry Deputy Minister Datuk Mukhriz Mahathir.

He said Malaysia's productivity level or output per employee last year at US$13,577 was 3.3 times higher than China's and 4.7 times higher than Indonesia's.

"However, comparisons with the productivity levels of more advanced countries in the region such as Korea at US$33,628 and Singapore at US$54,556 confirm that there is still room for improvement," he told reporters today after officiating the Productivity & Innovation

Conference and Exposition 2011 here today. Mukhriz said Malaysia needs to benchmark its productivity level against countries like Korea and Singapore which are doing better, adding this is where the focus on productivity and innovation comes to play…