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More appropriately, isn't it time to abandon the nation-state as the
primary unit of analysis? Transnational corporations [TNCs], as they
have accrued concentration, centralization, flexibility, wealth and
power have more and more used the nation-state as an instrument of
aggrandizement and have escaped reporting obligations and other
responsibilities to the constituents of national bodies. TNCs look to
the nation-state to stabilize the playing field for increased
accumulation and global reach - for purposes of disciplining labor,
providing infrastructure at no cost to the TNCs, subduing competition,
colluding in treaties which further eviscerate nation-states' capacity
to regulate and restrain TNCs to the benefit of their inhabitants,
including health, welfare, safety and environmental considerations.
TNCs minimize or eliminate completely tax obligations to their countries
of formal residence through lavish concessions for favoring states with
their presence, transfer pricing, parking profits in island tax havens,
other forms of deceitful accounting in the course of mergers and
acquisitions, double book-keeping, and all the benefits to them of
offshoring. TNCs manipulate the value-chain to the detriment of everyone
else. All exacerbated by their drastic restraints on labor mobility. And
needless to say, TNCs generate an ever-increasing share of global revenue.
Aside from international organizations like the IMF, World Bank, ILO and
UN institutions, where might there be any effective alternative source
of data on the actual existence and extent of revenues accrued by TNCs,
as well as the onerous drain on externalities? And these international
organizations exist largely at the pleasure of TNCs with no
accountability to the rest of us, have no enforceable reporting
requirements, deriving much if not all of of their data from
nation-states and figure-fudging financial institutions. Measuring
national income at best only provides an index after profit-taking and
claims on resources and environment, of what's left to the states for
tax revenue and for the 99%. Then there's the planet of slums, where
increasing numbers of us globally are not included in what statistics
may exist.
In short, we have no idea how bad things really are. Moreover. we don't
need another capital-apologist like Simon Kuznets to obfuscate for us,
suffocate us in yet another capital-serving legislative blizzard and
kick the can down the road.
Louis Proyect wrote
Is It Time to Abandon GDP?
by Edoardo Campanella
Like many great inventions, gross domestic product has been used in ways
that its creators never intended and might not approve. Given that it
misses so much that contributes to human wellbeing – and excludes even
more – why do we continue to rely on it as our primary welfare indicator?
NOV 4, 2016 20
MILAN – In a year of populist discontent across the West and narrowing
prospects for major emerging economies, the future may end up being
shaped in an unlikely setting: the world’s statistical offices. Among
ordinary people and specialists alike, there seems to be an increasingly
powerful sense of dissatisfaction not only with the pace of economic
growth, but with how that growth is defined and measured. There are two
reasons for this. First, aggregate economic growth in the developed
world has brought little, if any, benefit to the vast majority of
citizens in recent decades – a trend that has been particularly
pronounced against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis. As
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reminds us, “in the ‘recovery” of
2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income
growth.”
But second, and arguably more important, defining welfare solely in
terms of what can be measured by markets misses much of what contributes
to – or detracts from – human wellbeing. In 1968, Robert Kennedy,
campaigning for the presidency of the United States, lamented that this
approach “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”
It says nothing, for example, about environmental quality, the cohesion
of communities, or the stability of individual and group identities –
all of which clearly influence wellbeing. Such shortcomings not only
stoke suspicion of “experts” who tell us that we should be happier than
we are; they also prevent the experts themselves from accounting for
welfare effects implied by economic dynamism and innovation. As Barry
Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley points out, the
United States’ recen
