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Still full of ideas, but not making jobs
Americaneeds to share the benefits of innovationmore widely
THE economy is recovering, yet Americanconfidence remains mired at levels more commonlyseen in recessions. For that blame unemployment, petrol prices and a deeper, nagging feelingthat America is in decline. A Gallup poll in February asked Americans to name the world'sleading economic power. By a significant margin, they said China.
Barack Obama has exploited this anxiety. America, he has said, faces a new "Sputnik moment"and must "compete for the jobs and industries of our time" by spending more on research,education and infrastructure. But the notion that America is on the verge of being vanquishedby cleverer, more innovative competitors is flawed. First, competitiveness is a woollyconcept that wrongly supposes countries, like football teams, win only when another teamloses. But one country's economic growth does not subtract from another's. Second,America's ability to innovate and raise productivity remains reasonably healthy. The problem isthat the benefits of that innovation and productivity have become so narrowly concentratedthat workers'median wages have stagnated.
Towards the end of the last decade American productivity began to slump, a sign to somethat the pay-off from new information technology had largely been exhausted. But coming outof the recession productivity surged; it rose by 3.9% last year, the fastest rate since 2002.This was largely cyclical, since business output has recovered more quickly than hiring. Long-term productivity growth will be more modest, and its rate will depend on investment, humancapital and innovation.
After collapsing during the recession, investment in business equipment has bounced back,rising 17% in the last quarter of 2010 from the figure a year earlier. Human capital is more of achallenge. Americans once led the world in educational attainment, but this is now barely risingwhile other countries have caught up (see article). That is a key reason why Dale Jorgenson, aneconomist at Harvard University, reckons overall productivity growth will average 1.5% in thecoming decade, down from 2% in the previous two.
Innovation is what preoccupies Mr Obama. He worries that the next breakthroughs in energy,transport and information technology will occur elsewhere. His advisers fret that federalresearch and development has fallen sharply since the Sputnik era. But the picture is moreencouraging once private R&D is included. In 2008, the most recent year for which dataare available, total R&D was 2.8% of GDP, near the top of its historical range (see chart).American patent applications tailed off during the recession, but only after doubling in thedecade before.
Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think-tank backed by the technology industry, acknowledges that America starts from an impressive level, but says other countries are catching up as their growth in R&D and the number of their scientists and engineers gradually approaches, or overtakes, America's. China has doubled the share of its GDP devoted to R&D, although it remains below America's. In 2000 Americans filed six times as many patent applications as Chinese residents did. By 2009, however, China had surpassed the American total.
American companies have begun to build more R&D facilities in emerging countries, bothin response to local government pressure and to be closer to customers. General Electric,which already has research centres in China, India and Germany, announced last year that itwould put one in Brazil. This, it says, has not come at America's expense: GE plans to add twomore research centres in the United States to the one it runs in upstate New York. Mark Little,the head of GE Global Research, the company's in-house research division, says puttingscientists and researchers into other countries enables GE to come up with products it wouldnot have thought of before. For rural Chinese hospitals, more used to doing things manuallythan in America and Europe, GE designed less-automated MRI machines.
Adam Segal, author of "Advantage: How American Innovation can Overcome the AsianChallenge", says Asia's threat to American technological leadership is overstated. China'sresearch output is soaring, but much of it is poor-quality or based on plagiarism. Chinesecompanies are seizing market share in solar panels and wind turbines largely because of lowmanufacturing wages, says Mr Segal: "They have made no major breakthroughs in any of theunderlying technologies." R&D spending in India is minuscule.
The real problem for America is not its innovative capacity, but the fact that its benefits go torelatively few. This is illustrated by a recent paper by Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo,both of New York University. They divided jobs among tradable and non-tradable sectors.Tradable sectors include manufacturing, commodities and services such as finance andengineering that compete globally. Value-added per person, a proxy for productivity, rosesharply in this sector, but the number of jobs actually declined between 2000 and 2008. Theopposite was true in the non-tradable services such as government and health care. There realvalue-added rose only sluggishly, but employment expanded significantly. Behind this, says MrSpence, is the trend of American multinationals to keep the highest value-added activities athome while shifting lower value-added activities, such as manufacturing, abroad.
Qualcomm, a developer of mobile-phone chips and technology based in San Diego, earnsroughly 40% of its revenue from licensing and royalty fees for technology developed primarily inAmerica, where three-quarters of its employees work. Last year it spent $2.5 billion, or roughly20% of revenue, on R&D for such projects as developing Mirasol, an easy-to-read,energy-efficient phone display. Paul Jacobs, the company's boss, complains about highcorporate-tax rates and the difficulty of getting immigrant visas for foreign-born engineers andscientists, but maintains that America is not about to be superseded as a centre forinnovation. In California Qualcomm has access to the best college graduates and a pool ofideas and recruits generated by a nexus of established and start-up companies.
But Qualcomm has done no manufacturing of its own since selling its last handset plant in2000. Although Mirasol was developed in America, the displays will be made in Taiwan, which hasthe skills, the suppliers and the economies of scale.
These findings present a dilemma for America's policymakers. Raising federal R&Dspending and easing immigration for foreign-born PhDs would boost innovation and companysuccesses, but would not produce many jobs. Mr Spence and Mr Atkinson would like to seegovernment incentives aimed at strategic manufacturing sectors. But such policies have a poortrack record. And in any case Congress is in no mood to pay for them, no matter what MrObama says.
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