No início deste ano ao ler "Windows of Opportunity: How Nations Make Wealth" vi este esquema que reproduzi neste postal:
Tudo começa com:
"Figure 8 shows productivity development for a standard pair of men's shoes in the United States between 1850 and 1936. In 1850 15.5 work hours were required to produce a pair of standard men's shoes. Then a productivity explosion took place in shoe production, and rapid mechanization made it possible to employ only 1.7 labour hours to produce an identical pair of shoes fifty years later, in 1900. St Louis, Missouri, in this period became one of the wealthiest cities in the USA, based on production of shoes and beer: `First in shoes and beer, last in baseball' was the saying about the city that showed the world its wealth when hosting both the Olympic Games and a world fair in 1904. After 1900 the learning curve for shoes flattened out. In 1923 1.1 working hours were needed to produce the same pair of men's shoes. In 1936 0.9 hours were needed. As the learning curves flattened out, pressure on wages increased, and gradually shoe production was moved to poorer regions. The USA was an exporter of shoes for a long time, now the country imports practically all its shoes. This phenomenon - that rich countries export where there is great technological development, and import where there is little technological development - is related to what in the 1970s was dubbed the product life cycle in international trade by two Harvard business school professors who described the phenomenon, Raymond Vernon (1913-99) and Louis T. Wells.
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When a poor country gradually takes over shoe production, it will be close to impossible to increase the standard of living. This production is left to the poor countries, essentially because there is no more learning to be squeezed from the production process.
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Only when the learning curves and the experience curves flatten out and knowledge gets into the public domain can poor countries compete, and then competition is based on their low wages and relative poverty.
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Situations exist, however, where the dynamics described in the learning curves can be used for making poor countries rich, by upgrading them technologically in sequence. This model was named flying geese by the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu in the 1930s (see Figure 9) [Moi ici: A figura lá de cima]. Another Japanese economist and later Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s, Saburo Okita, followed the `flying geese' model and theorized that a poor country is able to upgrade its technology by jumping from one product to another with increasing knowledge content. The first flying goose, in this case Japan, breaks the air resistance for the next ones, so gradually all of them can sequentially benefit from the same technological change. For example, many years ago Japan produced inexpensive garments, [Moi ici: Recordo sempre um filme de 1944, "A pricesa e o pirata" com Bob Hope. O filme passa-se no século XVIII, Bob Hope era um pirata a lutar contra outros piratas. Defendia-se com um gancho. Um pirata com um simples toque da espada deu cabo do gancho. A cena como que pára, Bob Hope olha para o gancho e lê "Made in Japan". Então exclama algo como, "não se pode confiar nestes produtos"] achieving productivity increases which boosted the standard of living ('collusive mode') so much that a relatively unsophisticated product like a garment could no longer be produced profitably there. [Mo ici: Percebem o significado deste último sublinhado? E volto ao Maliranta, a Taleb e ao exemplo do Jorge Marrão e à entrevista de Paulo Rangel referida aqui. Acham que um político de direita ou de esquerda tem a coragem de enunciar o meu conselho de Dezembro de 2018, "Deixem as empresas morrer!". Acreditar que a empresa média consegue dar o salto na escala de produtividade... só uma minoria o faz, a maioria aproveita os apoios para prolongar o modelo de negócio actual. Como não recordar Spender] Production was taken over by South Korea, while Japan gradually upgraded its manufacturing to something more sophisticated, like TV production. When South Korea upgraded, garments were then for a while produced in Taiwan, until the same thing happened there; production costs grew too high. Production then moved to Thailand and Malaysia, and history repeated itself. Finally, production of garments was moved to Vietnam. In the meantime, however, a whole row of countries had used garment production to raise their standard of living; they had all surfed sequentially down the same learning curve, and all had become richer. Of course, this game requires that the head goose continuously gets involved in new technologies."
É o velho tema do primeiro princípio de Deming, "Constância de propósito" e volto a 2009 e a Maio passado. Hoje, no JdN Francisco Assis discorre naturalmente sobre a necessidade de aumentar o salário mínimo e de ... apoiar as empresas que não o possam pagar. Acham isto normal?
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