On Wed, 25 Mar 2015 14:13:34 -0500, dpb wrote:
On 03/25/2015 1:29 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Wed, 25 Mar 2015 10:20:39 -0400, Joe
wrote:
...
The two data points are connected - Greece has far more government than
is healthy or affordable.
As we can see from the figures above, that's obviously not the issue.
You should have stopped with "Greece's problems are caused by gross
mismanagement."g
...
Well, it _is_ the problem; it's just that those aren't the full story...
I don't see how anyone could conclude that it's a problem. Here are
the countries with the highest GDP per capita (IMF figures), and their
percentage of government employees (federal, state, local, and public
corp. employees). I didn't include Qatar because they're just
oil-suckers:
Luxembourg - 17.6%
Norway - 34.5
Switzerland - 14.5
Australia - 15.6
Denmark - 31.5
That's an average of 22.7% of their labor forces working in government
jobs. That's higher than Greece.
Just going on the success rate, it looks like an advanced economy
needs a pretty substantial percentage of its workforce in government.
Those are mostly service jobs, a lot of them infrastructure-related,
and there appears to be little or no advantage to letting them go
where they may in the private sector. That is, in terms of economic
success.
Of course, this doesn't fit with conservative economic theory, but
conservative economic theory is mostly crap, anyway. Stick with the
facts instead of the ideologies, and things look a little different.
The four of the five PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) are the the
2nd-thru sixth ranking for the highest percentage of central government
debt as %GDP trailing only Japan as #1 and Cyprus #3. Greece is #2 at
165% (yr end 2012, last data year in World Bank summary).
Debt is a different question. Comparing the US to Greece, the US debt
is deignated in our own currency. That makes the situation so
different that there is no comparison at all.
It's that overwhelming debt service that is crippling them
internationally as they're on the brink of default about every six
months or so.
Really? Japan, the leader in debt? Germany, where national debt is 40%
higher than the US on GDP, and 20% higher per capita? The UK, where it
is 400% of the per-capita debt of the US? Switzerland, where their
per-capita debt is 2.2 TIMES that of the US?
Greece's per-capita debt is lower than that of the Netherlands,
France, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark...
....and it's only slightly higher than that of Germany.
It appears that there's no relationship.
Besides the rampant corruption and all, the uncertainty
is the bane of any investment; entrepreneurial folks don't put money
where they perceive high risk/little reward.
The high risk doesn't appear to be related to perceived corruption.
Greece ranks 94 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, tied with India,
and there isn't any shortage of investment in India going on.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results#myAnchor1
Unfortunately, in the direction the US is headed, we're currently in the
top "dirty dozen" and risin'... 
I don't think so. When it comes to international finance, and even to
macroeconomics in general, "common sense" is about as useful as tits
on a bull.
It's more complicated than that.
--
Ed Huntress