For those who haven’t heard the sad news, Denis died on January 20. He worked for many years in the ESRI and then, in his ‘retirement’, in NUI Maynooth and UCD. He was a brilliant statistician and a real giant of the Irish Economics world. He was always generous in sharing his knowledge with colleagues, particularly the PhD students with whom he worked. He was also encyclopaedic on local and military history, and an avid hill-walker. He will be greatly missed.
Author: Aedín Doris
In a comment on another post, Declan Fallon raises some interesting issues about the distribution of forthcoming pain. I thought it might be interesting to tease this out a bit more.
Most of the debate about the incidence of the fiscal adjustment has focussed on the public/private sector divide and, to a (regrettably) lesser extent on the insider/outsider (i.e. employed vs. unemployed) divide. However, there is certainly a demographic aspect to this. For example, after the medical card debacle, pensioners seem to be guaranteed immunity from the adjustment – one of the reasons for implementing the public sector pay cut as a pension levy rather than a pay cut was to protect the pensions of current pensioners; and, as Philip Lane mentioned at Monday’s conference, this protection is likely to extend to the budget. But it seems certain that child benefits will be further cut. Does this make sense?
As Declan emphasizes, children are not pure consumption goods; if they were, then the only argument against cutting payments in respect of children would be the particular necessity of keeping children out of poverty, in which case cutting child benefit – at least to the middle classes – would make perfect sense. But children are effectively investments too; they have long term economic value. It is in the public interest for citizens to produce children. So if putting the burden of the adjustment on parents has the effect of reducing fertility, the long-run negative effects may cause us to regret it.
Q1 Earnings data were published by the CSO ten days ago, and I’ve only just got around to having a look at them. The data refer only to Industry (Manufacturing, Mining & Utilities) and Financial Intermediation; the new Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey on which these data are based also collects for Construction and Distribution and Business Services, but data on these sectors haven’t been published yet, so the most up to date figures for these refer to December 08.
I went to look at the data because I had a hunch that earnings cuts were being driven by flat hourly pay and falling hours.
I was concerned about this as it seems to me that hourly earnings are more important than weekly earnings for competitiveness – where hours of work have been cut, and earnings have fallen only for this reason, we should see this being reversed if and when demand picks up again, so this won’t result in a long term improvement. (It is possible that the recession has allowed employers to reduce overmanning/featherbedding and that this will be a permanent effect on productivity, but I doubt if that’s the main story.)
In any case, I was wrong: the flat pay just doesn’t seem to be there. In fact, the short answer to the question in the title is: in Financial Intermediation and Mining. Everywhere else, there are wage rises.
For industrial workers, average hourly earnings rose by 5.9% from Q108 to Q109. This figure includes bonuses and overtime payments. Weekly hours fell by 2.4%, though, so the increase in average weekly earnings was just 3.4%. Within industrial workers, weekly earnings of those in Mining fell by 8.1%, but this was entirely due to a fall in hours of work, with hourly wages actually rising by 1.5%.
Within Industry, a breakdown by occupational category is also given. Managers & professionals’ hourly pay rose by 3.5%, and their weekly pay by 2.9%; Production workers’ hourly pay rose by 5.2%, weekly by 1.2%; only Clerical workers’ pay has fallen – the hourly figure is down by 0.9%, and the weekly is down by 1.2%. Interestingly, the reason the headline figure – the +5.9% I mentioned above – is higher than any of these occupational category components is because of a pretty big shift in the composition of workers – the number of Production workers has fallen by 12.3% whereas the number of Managers has risen by 2.1% and the number of clerical workers by 1.9%. So the proportion of chiefs has risen.
For Financial Intermediation, average earnings have fallen, and all the action is in bonuses. Hourly base wages have actually risen by 5.4%, but bonuses fell by 65% between Q108 and Q109. The average bonus was 30.6% of base salary in Q108 but ‘only’ 10.1% in Q109. Because of the collapse of bonuses (relatively speaking – the average industrial worker got a bonus of 7.4% of base pay in Q109), average total hourly earnings fell by 11.1% and average weekly earnings fell by 12.7%.
As I mentioned, CSO hasn’t published the Q109 figures for Construction or Services yet. But the figures for Q408 compared to Q407 showed that while average weekly pay in Construction was down 2.4%, average hourly pay was up 2.3%; and in Services, weekly earnings were up 3.1% between December 07 and December 08. No hourly figures are given.
It all seems a far cry from the heady days of April, when very large nominal pay cuts in the private sector were being discussed in the media. In a post on this blog, Colm McCarthy tentatively concluded, on the basis of some private surveys, that “[B]earing in mind the different periods covered, it looks as if the private sector pay cut overall, allowing for the small number paying increases and the larger number of freezers, has already reached 6 or 7%”. I was sceptical, but thought that 3% was quite likely.
Is it the case that Industry alone is escaping pay cuts and that when the Q1 figures come out for Construction and Services, the numbers will add up to substantial nominal cuts? Or were we just dreaming? Did we just want to believe that Irish workers were proving very amenable to the kind of cuts needed to improve competitiveness? Or is there some other detail of the data that I’m not appreciating that’s masking the truth?
In a recent post, Patrick Honohan raised the issue of what a sustainable tax system would look like, and in a follow up to that post, discussed whether a goal of keeping low income workers out of the tax net implied, with the current tax revenue requirement, tax rates on other earners that were so high as to have serious disincentive effects. In the ensuing discussion, John McHale suggested that I was being too sanguine about the incentive effects at the top of the distribution and helpfully pointed me towards a literature that I wasn’t familiar with, on the tax rate elasticity of taxable income, and particularly to a paper by Gruber and Saez (J.Pub.Econ., 2002), which finds an average elasticity of 0.4, with higher elasticities for high earners.
There are two reasons why we should be worried if income elasticities for this group are so high. First, a pragmatic one: it suggests that revenue will rise relatively little if we increase tax rates on this group. Second, a more worrying one: this group contains the job creators; if they’re discouraged from taking the risks and reduce their labour market effort, then there are far bigger knock-on effects in jobs that would have been created with lower tax rates, but now won’t be. The latter concern dominates much of the discussion on this matter – see, for example, Greg Connor’s comment here.
And so, an elasticity of 0.4 would indeed have to cause a rethink on my part. So I went off to read the paper.
The paper is fascinating. It does indeed find an elasticity of taxable income to marginal tax rates of 0.4, with an even higher elasticity of 0.57 for high earners. (Note to explain the counter-intuitive sign: this is actually an elasticity wrt the net-of-tax rate, i.e. if the marginal rate goes up by 1%, so that the net-of-tax rate goes down by 1%, this causes a 40% decrease in income). But the elasticity of ‘broad’ income – income before tax exemptions are taken out – is much lower; it is 0.12 on average, and 0.17 for high earners. The bulk of the difference between these two elasticities is due to changes in what the authors call ‘itemization behaviour’ – in other words, tax avoidance. This point is reinforced by several other analyses in the paper.
One of the two policy conclusions drawn is that
“[t]he large elasticities that we observe are driven by ‘holes’ in the tax base that allow taxpayers, particularly at higher income levels, to reduce their tax burdens. With a broader tax base we would distort behavior less and could therefore raise revenues more efficiently.”
[The second is that concern about the distorting impact of high implicit tax rates in the $10k-$50k income range due to changes in effort (hours) “…may be overblown”, and that attention should instead be paid to incentives that reward participation rather than marginal increments to hours worked.]
So the paper’s message is (i) that the effect on (potentially job-creating) effort by high fliers of increasing tax rates is not zero, but is not high and (ii) that getting rid of tax write-offs should be a priority, particularly if marginal rates on high earners are to be raised.