Regulando

Según el McKinsey Quarterly,

"In a recent study of 145 countries, the World Bank found that the administrative cost of complying with regulations is three times higher for businesses in poor countries than for those in rich ones. Yet businesses in poor countries have less than half the protection for property rights. Heavy regulation and weak property rights, moreover, exclude the poor from business. Women, young, and low-skilled workers suffer most.

Las boludeces regulatorias no son privativas del 3er mundo, desde luego:

"Germany restricts the hours when retail stores can be open in order to protect their workers and to make Sundays special. But these regulations, combined with high minimum wages and with zoning laws limiting hypermarkets, have helped keep the productivity of German retailing 15 percent below that of retailing in the United States"

Y entre los países desarrollados, existen diferencias, como ilustra este párrafo:

"Furthermore, regulations guaranteeing decent wages for the most poorly paid workers often limit the creation of new low-skill jobs in service industries. France, for instance, sets its minimum wage at a level twice that of the United States. As a result, US retailers employ 50 percent more people per capita than do their French counterparts. Although not plum jobs, these do boost the economy's overall ability to create wealth while helping many low-skilled employees avoid social exclusion and giving them an opportunity to move up the income ladder. Instead of raising the minimum wage, with its possibly damaging secondary effects, governments can provide assistance to low-income workers by using earned-income tax credits to reduce their taxes."

Y dentro de Europa también hay diferencias:

"Spain....in the 1990s, ......introduced more flexible labor laws that helped cut unemployment by 40 percent in only six years. Among other things, the reforms let employers and employees negotiate contracts (rather than having labor laws dictate the terms) and created a new type of permanent contract, which reduced the employers' payouts to laid-off workers by 60 percent, for youths and other groups that have unusual difficulty finding jobs.

Belgium, by contrast, maintains generous early-retirement schemes intended to promote corporate restructuring and to keep the peace with labor. But they have generated huge costs for the government and given the country one of Europe's lowest employment rates. Only one in four Belgians aged 55 to 64 works."

Los yanquis tampoco están libres de errores:

"In the United States, for example, anxiety about losing service jobs to offshore providers is widespread. But MGI research indicates that the US economy as a whole gains sizable benefits from offshoring, through corporate savings, additional exports, repatriated profits, and greater productivity.

Rather than seeking to prevent the loss of jobs eliminated through the search for higher productivity, regulators should focus on cushioning the blow for workers who become unemployed and on easing their transition to new jobs. Such assistance could include retraining programs and company-sponsored insurance to offset lower wages. From 1979 to 1999, however, 69 percent of the US workers who lost their jobs through the offshoring of services found new work within six months, and roughly half moved to higher-value-added activities"