From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Jan 17 2006 - 18:45:38 EST
The Harvard "expert" has got to be joking - the majority of Chinese, Indian and Russian workers do not work in international import/export industries, and the more China, India and Russia privatise and corporatise public assets, the more capital there is. Plenty assets there, but whether you can trade in them, that is the question. In reality, there exists of course vastly more capital than is actually tied up in physical assets, if anything, an economic challenge of our times is a plethora of idle money capital globally chasing the best interest rates. In addition, exchange rates distort the picture - Chinese GDP at ppp becomes four times larger, India's five times larger, Russia's nearly three times larger. The size of the world bond market alone is said to have developed as follows, in approximate figures, current dollars: 1996 $11 trillion 1999 $30 trillion 2000 $32 trillion 2001 $33 trillion (BIS estimate $37 trillion) 2004 about $40 trillion (own crude estimate) In other words, since 1990, the amount of capital invested in bonds has at least doubled and probably trebled, taking account inflation (the US CPI rose about 43% or so since 1990, I don't have an exact figure just now). Some estimates suggest the world bond market is about 50% larger than the corporate stocks market, I haven't the time to calculate a figure just now but that data does exist. Obviously bonds are only one component of total capital reserves. Apart from other securities, Henry Liu has highlighted a "dollar glut", i.e. foreign dollar reserves held by governments that aren't used. Some data I've cited before: 2003 value of the world's stock market capitalisation (i.e. the market value of equity capital of publicly listed companies) $31.2 trillion (of which EU $7.7 trillion, USA $14.3 trillion, Japan $4.9 trillion) 2003 value of the world's debt securities (bonds, derivatives etc.) $52 trillion (of which EU $16.7 trillion, USA $22 trillion, Japan $8.4 trillion) 2003 value of the world's commercial bank assets $40.6 trillion (of which EU $18.1 trillion, USA $5.7 trillion, Japan $6.2 trillion) (Source: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfsr/2004/02/pdf/statappx.pdf) One of my intended projects was to analyse the structure of the global labour force statistically - the ILO also provides lots of useful base data for this, but like I say, didn't get around to it, and I cannot get funding, and they say I'm too old for Phd. Paul Bairoch published an in-depth study in 1968 called "La population active et sa structure" (The economically active population and its structure - Bruxelles : Université Libre, 1968, 236 pp. series Statistiques internationales rétrospectives; vol. 1) providing historical series. However he doesn't classify by employment status all that much. The ILO now offers a useful CD with forty years world data on it, the trouble though is that it isn't fully complete or fully comprehensive insofar as some levels of detail are lacking. One still has to refer to national data sources to complete the employment status picture, a considerable amount of work. In a wiki article, I've noted that in one World Bank study (brought to my attention by Chris Harman) Deon Filmer estimated that 2,474 million people participated in the global non-domestic labour force (I assume including unemployed) in the mid-1990s. Of these 379 million people, worked in industry, 800 million in services, and 1,074 million in agriculture. The majority of workers in industry and services were wage & salary earners - 58 percent of the industrial workforce and 65 percent of the services workforce. But a big portion were self-employed or involved in family labour. Filmer suggests the total of employees worldwide in the 1990s was about 880 million, compared with around a billion working on own account on the land (mainly peasants), and some 480 million working on own account in industry and services. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour (the ref is Deon Filmer, Estimating the World at Work, a background report for World Bank's World Development Report 1995 (Washington DC, 1995).) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=620678 However the aggregates and definitions Filmer uses have to be scrutinised carefully. Plenty of work for future researchers! Jurriaan
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