Feeling Moody

Global rating agency Moody's Investors Service sees a persistent decline in labour productivity growth, stemming from an ageing population and slow investments, as posing a key threat to global economic recovery.

The agency's report, titled "Collapse of Global Productivity Growth Remains Sizable Risk to Credit Conditions," published last week said global labour productivity growth fell to an average 1.7% in the post global financial crisis years of 2011-2015, compared to an average 2.6% between 1995-2007, Moody's.com reported.

In 2016 alone, labour productivity growth slowed to just 1.2%. Moody's said if productivity growth remains unchanged, global economic growth next year might be as low as 2.5%, significantly lower than previous estimates of 3.5%.

What are we doing about it?  What can we do about it?

Robots are not the answer

The last 2 decades have sen the inexorable rise of the robot - especially in motor manufacture.  We have all seen the robotic arms lifting and fitting panels, spray painting, and so on.  Some workers have presumably been displaced  - but the economic gains have been substantial, surely.

Well, this rise of †he robot has been matched with the lowest productivity growth in recorded times.

Coincidence or causal relationship?

Well, there is some evidence that those displaced workers have had to take low paid, possibly part-time work - not the high skill jobs that were predicted.  And, worse - some could find no alternative work at all - the jobs are in the wrong place!

So, the rise of the robot might be good only for those who make and sell robots.  Or perhaps it simply takes time for society to adapt to such a massive change.

Do we have the right education?

In the developing world, education standards have been rising for decades.  More and more of the population go to university and the number of degrees, and even higher degrees, rises relentlessly.

Yet, still employers maintain - as they always have done - that they cannot get employees with the right skills.

Note the word 'skills'.  Employers don't want more knowledge - that is easy to provide via Google - but skills are both expensive to provide -and take a long time to develop.

This means that the 'education' system must become more of an 'education and skills' system and skills must receive parity of esteem with knowledge.

In the UK, the proposed 'T levels' might help - but past initiatives have failed to change the 'esteem' with which skills are held. Teachers are knowledge-based - the wrong people to guide kids through a skills-based curriculum.  Changing this will take perhaps a couple of generations, helped by kids' increasing reluctance to take on the massive loans to fund university attendance.

But, of course, employers must play their part - by reducing their reliance on the degree as a 'first sift' of job applicants -and recognising skills where they exist.

Automation isn't everything.

Japan has a highly automated industrial sector which has fuelled productivity growth over several years. However this efficient sector is only a pat of the Japanese economy (though an important part) and the rest of the economy - and especially the services sector has a very poor track record - relying on long hours of hard work to get things done, rather than streamlined processes and procedures.

The lesson is that you need to make improvements where they have maximum impact, not where they are easiest to make.