Greenspan - mercado de trabalho
Enviado: 11/3/2004 17:59March 11 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy is showing ``increasing signals of recovery'' that should boost job growth soon, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said.
``In all likelihood, employment will begin to increase more quickly before long as output continues to expand,'' Greenspan told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. ``We have reason to be confident that new jobs will replace old ones as they always have.''
Payrolls rose by 21,000 jobs in February, just a sixth of what economists expected, and 1.6 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce in the past year, the Labor Department said last month. Jobs are a main topic in this year's election, with Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, saying President George W. Bush hasn't done enough to help.
``New job creation is lagging badly,'' Greenspan said, suggesting that's one reason consumer confidence has fallen. ``Job insecurity is understandably significant when nearly 2 million members of our workforce have been unemployed for more than six months,'' he said.
While ``new hires are going to be picking up reasonably quickly if this economic growth rate continues, I think that considering the possibility of extending unemployment insurance is not a bad idea,'' Greenspan said.
The Fed chairman didn't comment on the level of interest rates in the text of his prepared remarks. He did not suggest when job growth would pick up, although his forecast of imminent hiring was similar to remarks he made in congressional testimony last month.
Productivity Problem
``He's got about a 50-50 chance of being right, but he sounds more and more like he's becoming a cheerleader for the administration,'' said Barry P. Bosworth, former director of the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability and now an economist at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan research group in Washington. ``Greenspan is guessing it's going to get better. Most people I hear from are getting nervous about the situation.''
Weak job creation is the ``ironic consequence of accelerated gains in productivity,'' the Fed chairman said. For all of last year, productivity rose 4.4 percent following a 5 percent gain in 2002, Labor Department figures showed last week. That marks the first back-to-back years exceeding 4 percent since record keeping began in 1947.
A major reason companies are searching for cheaper labor around the world is ``relentless'' American consumer demand for low prices, the Fed chairman said.
Consumer Pressure
``Retailers are afforded little leeway in product sourcing,'' Greenspan said. ``If consumers are stern taskmasters of their marketplace, business purchasers of capital equipment and production materials inputs have taken the competitive paradigm a step further and applied it on a global scale.''
Calls for measures to protect U.S. jobs from foreign competition are an ``alleged cure'' that would ``make matters worse rather than better,'' he said. ``Our standard of living would soon begin to stagnate and perhaps even decline as a consequence.''
Education is Greenspan's answer to fears that outsourcing will reduce job opportunities for Americans in both manufacturing and services.
``As history clearly shows, our economy is best served by full and vigorous engagement in the global economy,'' Greenspan said. ``Consequently, we need to increase our efforts to ensure that as many of our citizens as possible have the opportunity to capture the benefits that flow from that engagement.''
Education and Employment
Yet the U.S. educational system is graduating too few workers trained to keep up with the brisk pace of technology-intensive investment in the economy, he said.
``We have developed a shortage of highly skilled workers and a surplus of lesser skilled workers,'' Greenspan told the committee. That's one reason why wage inequality is widening, he said.
Congress has entrusted the Fed with achieving the maximum level employment consistent with low, stable inflation. Greenspan defined that level as an unemployment rate ``close down to the 4 percent level'' in his testimony before the House Finance Committee last month. The unemployment rate stood at 5.6 percent in February.
Greenspan's appearance before a non-economic Congressional committee is somewhat unusual. Last year, he spoke before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and before the Senate Special Committee on Aging.
There is an inverse relation between the level of education and unemployment, Bureau of Labor Statistics show. The unemployment rate for workers 25 years and older without a high school diploma stood at 8.5 percent in February.
For workers with a high school diploma, it stood at 5 percent, below the national average of 5.6 percent. The unemployment rate for workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher stood at 2.9 percent in February. Still, there were 1.17 million of these college-educated workers looking for jobs last month.
``In all likelihood, employment will begin to increase more quickly before long as output continues to expand,'' Greenspan told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. ``We have reason to be confident that new jobs will replace old ones as they always have.''
Payrolls rose by 21,000 jobs in February, just a sixth of what economists expected, and 1.6 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce in the past year, the Labor Department said last month. Jobs are a main topic in this year's election, with Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, saying President George W. Bush hasn't done enough to help.
``New job creation is lagging badly,'' Greenspan said, suggesting that's one reason consumer confidence has fallen. ``Job insecurity is understandably significant when nearly 2 million members of our workforce have been unemployed for more than six months,'' he said.
While ``new hires are going to be picking up reasonably quickly if this economic growth rate continues, I think that considering the possibility of extending unemployment insurance is not a bad idea,'' Greenspan said.
The Fed chairman didn't comment on the level of interest rates in the text of his prepared remarks. He did not suggest when job growth would pick up, although his forecast of imminent hiring was similar to remarks he made in congressional testimony last month.
Productivity Problem
``He's got about a 50-50 chance of being right, but he sounds more and more like he's becoming a cheerleader for the administration,'' said Barry P. Bosworth, former director of the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability and now an economist at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan research group in Washington. ``Greenspan is guessing it's going to get better. Most people I hear from are getting nervous about the situation.''
Weak job creation is the ``ironic consequence of accelerated gains in productivity,'' the Fed chairman said. For all of last year, productivity rose 4.4 percent following a 5 percent gain in 2002, Labor Department figures showed last week. That marks the first back-to-back years exceeding 4 percent since record keeping began in 1947.
A major reason companies are searching for cheaper labor around the world is ``relentless'' American consumer demand for low prices, the Fed chairman said.
Consumer Pressure
``Retailers are afforded little leeway in product sourcing,'' Greenspan said. ``If consumers are stern taskmasters of their marketplace, business purchasers of capital equipment and production materials inputs have taken the competitive paradigm a step further and applied it on a global scale.''
Calls for measures to protect U.S. jobs from foreign competition are an ``alleged cure'' that would ``make matters worse rather than better,'' he said. ``Our standard of living would soon begin to stagnate and perhaps even decline as a consequence.''
Education is Greenspan's answer to fears that outsourcing will reduce job opportunities for Americans in both manufacturing and services.
``As history clearly shows, our economy is best served by full and vigorous engagement in the global economy,'' Greenspan said. ``Consequently, we need to increase our efforts to ensure that as many of our citizens as possible have the opportunity to capture the benefits that flow from that engagement.''
Education and Employment
Yet the U.S. educational system is graduating too few workers trained to keep up with the brisk pace of technology-intensive investment in the economy, he said.
``We have developed a shortage of highly skilled workers and a surplus of lesser skilled workers,'' Greenspan told the committee. That's one reason why wage inequality is widening, he said.
Congress has entrusted the Fed with achieving the maximum level employment consistent with low, stable inflation. Greenspan defined that level as an unemployment rate ``close down to the 4 percent level'' in his testimony before the House Finance Committee last month. The unemployment rate stood at 5.6 percent in February.
Greenspan's appearance before a non-economic Congressional committee is somewhat unusual. Last year, he spoke before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and before the Senate Special Committee on Aging.
There is an inverse relation between the level of education and unemployment, Bureau of Labor Statistics show. The unemployment rate for workers 25 years and older without a high school diploma stood at 8.5 percent in February.
For workers with a high school diploma, it stood at 5 percent, below the national average of 5.6 percent. The unemployment rate for workers with a Bachelor's degree or higher stood at 2.9 percent in February. Still, there were 1.17 million of these college-educated workers looking for jobs last month.