23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Now, saying that foreign capital is likely to be less good for your country than your own national capital is not to say that we should always prefer national capital to foreign capital. This is because its nationality is not the only thing that determines the behaviour of capital. The intention and the capability of the capital in question also matter.

Suppose that you are thinking of selling a struggling nationally owned car company. Ideally, you want the new owner to have the willingness and the ability to upgrade the company in the long run. The prospective buyer is more likely to have the technological capabilities to do so when it is an already established automobile producer, whether national or foreign, rather than when it is finance capital, such as a private equity fund.

In recent years, private equity funds have played an increasingly important role in corporate acquisitions. Even though they have no in-house expertise in particular industries, they may, in theory, acquire a company for the long term and hire industry experts as managers and ask them to upgrade its capabilities. However, in practice, these funds usually have no intention to upgrade the acquired company for the long term. They acquire firms with a view to selling them on in three to five years after restructuring them into profitability. Such restructuring, given the time horizon, usually involves cutting costs (especially sacking workers and refraining from long-term investments), rather than raising capabilities. Such restructuring is likely to hurt the long-term prospects of the company by weakening its ability to generate productivity growth. In the worst cases, private equity funds may acquire companies with the explicit intention to engage in asset-stripping, selling the valuable assets of a company without regard to its long-term future. What the now-notorious Phoenix Venture Holdings did to the British car-maker Rover, which they had bought from BMW, is a classic example of this (the so-called ‘Phoenix Four’ became particularly notorious for paying themselves huge salaries and their friends exorbitant consultancy fees).

Of course, this is not to say that firms that are already operating in the industry will always have the intention to upgrade the acquired company for the long term either. When GM acquired a series of smaller foreign car companies – such as Sweden’s Saab and Korea’s Daewoo – during the decade before its bankruptcy in 2009, the intention was to live off the technologies accumulated by these companies, rather than to upgrade them (see Thing 18). Moreover, recently the distinction between industrial capital and finance capital has come to be blurred, with industrial companies such as GM and GE making more profits in finance than in industry (see Thing 22), so the fact that the acquiring firm operates in a particular industry is not a guarantee of a long-term commitment to that industry.

So, if a foreign company operating in the same industry is buying up your national company with a serious long-term commitment, selling it to that company may be better than selling it to your own national private equity fund. However, other things being equal, the chance is that your national company is going to act in a way that is more favourable to your national economy.

Thus, despite the globalization rhetoric, the nationality of a firm is still a key to deciding where its high- grade activities, such as R&D and strategizing, are going to be located. Nationality is not the only determinant of firm behaviour, so we need to take into account other factors, such as whether the investor has a track record in the industry concerned and how strong its long-term commitment to the acquired company really is. While a blind rejection of foreign capital is wrong, it would be very naive to design economic policies on the myth that capital does not have national roots any more. After all, Lord Mandelson’s belatedly found reservations turn out to have a serious basis in reality.

Thing 9 We do not live in a post-industrial age

What they tell you

Our economy has been fundamentally transformed during the last few decades. Especially in the rich countries, manufacturing industry, once the driving force of capitalism, is not important any more. With the natural tendency for the (relative) demand for services to rise with prosperity and with the rise of high-productivity knowledge-based services (such as banking and management consulting), manufacturing industries have gone into decline in all rich countries. These countries have entered the ‘post-industrial’ age, where most people work in services and most outputs are services. The decline of manufacturing is not only something natural that we needn’t worry about but something that we should really celebrate. With the rise of knowledge-based services, it may be better even for some developing countries to skip those doomed manufacturing activities altogether and leapfrog straight to a service-based post-industrial economy.

What they don’t tell you

We may be living in a post-industrial society in the sense that most of us work in shops and offices rather than in factories. But we have not entered a post-industrial stage of development in the sense that industry has become unimportant. Most (although not all) of the shrinkage in the share of manufacturing in total output is not due to the fall in the absolute quantity of manufactured goods produced but due to the fall in their prices relative to those for services, which is caused by their faster growth in productivity (output per unit of input). Now, even though de-industrialization is mainly due to this differential productivity growth across sectors, and thus may not be something negative in itself, it has negative consequences for economy-wide productivity growth and for the balance of payments, which cannot be ignored. As for the idea that developing countries can largely skip industrialization and enter the post-industrial phase directly, it is a fantasy. Their limited scope for productivity growth makes services a poor engine of growth. The low tradability of services means that a more service-based economy will have a lower ability to export. Lower export earnings means a weaker ability to buy advanced technologies from abroad, which in turn leads to a slower growth.

Is there anything that is not made in China?

One day, Jin-Gyu, my nine-year-old son (yes, that’s the one who appeared as ‘my six-year-old son’ in my earlier book Bad Samaritans– really quite a versatile actor, he is) came and asked me: ‘Daddy, is there anything that is not made in China?’ I told him that, yes, it may not look that way, but other countries still make things. I then struggled to come up with an example. I was about to mention his ‘Japanese’ Nintendo DSi game console, but then I remembered seeing ‘Made in China’ on it. I managed to tell him that some mobile phones and flat-screen TVs are made in Korea, but I could not think of many other things that a nine-year- old would recognize (he is still too young for things like BMW). No wonder China is now called the ‘workshop of the world’.

It is hard to believe, but the phrase ‘workshop of the world’ was originally coined for Britain, which today, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has ‘no industry’. Having successfully launched the Industrial Revolution before other countries, Britain became such a dominant industrial power by the mid nineteenth century that it felt confident enough to completely liberalize its trade (see Thing 7). In 1860, it produced 20 per cent of world manufacturing output. In 1870, it accounted for 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. The current Chinese share in world exports is only around 17 per cent (as of 2007), even though ‘everything’ seems to be made in China, so you can imagine the extent of British dominance then.

However, Britain’s pole position was shortlived. Having liberalized its trade completely around 1860, its relative position started declining from the 1880s, with countries such as the US and Germany rapidly catching up. It lost its leading position in the world’s industrial hierarchy by the time of the First World War, but the dominance of manufacturing in the British economy itself continued for a long time afterwards. Until the early 1970s, together with Germany, Britain had one of the world’s highest shares of manufacturing employment in total employment, at around 35 per cent. At the time, Britain was the quintessential manufacturing economy, exporting manufactured goods and importing food, fuel and raw materials. Its manufacturing trade surplus (manufacturing exports minus manufacturing imports) stayed consistently between 4 per cent and 6 per cent of GDP during the 1960s and 70s.

Since the 1970s, however, the British manufacturing sector has shrunk rapidly in importance. Manufacturing output as a share of Britain’s GDP used to be 37 per cent in 1950. Today, it accounts for only around 13 per cent. Manufacturing’s share in total employment fell from around 35 per cent in the early 1970s to just over 10 per cent.[1] Its position in international trade has also dramatically changed. These days, Britain runs manufacturing trade deficits in the region of 2–4 per cent of GDP per year. What has happened? Should Britain be worried?