The Trump Administration: Lots of Noise But Nothing Changed For US TNCs

President Trump has long pointed to the US balance of payments deficit as a sign of US economic weakness. Of course, his nation-state focus, and claim that trade deficits with countries such as China and Mexico are the result of unfair trading practices that benefit foreign business and workers at the expense of US business and workers, is misleading.  These deficits owe much to the operation of US corporate controlled cross-border production networks, which have boosted US corporate power and profits largely at the expense of workers in all three countries.

Criticizing past administrations for selling out America, President Trump has pursued a series of policies—renegotiated trade agreements, tariff wars, public shaming of corporate disinvestment, and tax reform—all of which are supposed to help rebuild the US economy by encouraging US firms to modernize and expand their US operations. These policies have all failed to achieve their stated aim.  In fact, they have, largely by design, only served to strengthen existing corporate dominated patterns of international production and value capture.

As a result, there has been little change in US trade patterns.  The US trade deficit in goods, as shown below, has continued to grow every year of the Trump presidency.

Strengthening TNC power and profits

After first threatening to dissolve NAFTA, President Trump eventually pursued a rewrite of the NAFTA agreement.  However, his proposed changes to the agreement primarily speak to corporate needs, especially the new chapters that increase protection for intellectual property rights and promote greater cross-border freedom for electronic commerce and digital trade.  Similarly, the Trump tariff “war” against China appears primarily aimed at forcing the Chinese government to tighten regulations protecting US intellectual property rights and open new sectors of its economy to US foreign investment, especially the finance sector.

President Trump has also engaged in occasional twitter “wars” against corporate decisions to close or relocate abroad part of their operations.  Initially, corporate leaders felt pressure to modify or delay their decisions.  Now, no doubt reassured by the general policy direction of the Trump administration, they no longer appear worried about his periodic outbursts.  For example, both GM and Harley Davidson recently announced plans to shut domestic plants in favor of overseas production and have largely ignored Trump’s tweets critical of their globalization activities.

Much has been written about these efforts, but little about the consequences of the last policy, tax cuts, on US TNC decision-making.  The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” Act, signed into law on Dec. 22, 2017, was promoted as a way to encourage US transnational corporations to bring back funds held outside the country and boost their domestic investment.  However, as a Bank of France blog post by Cristina Jude and Francesco Pappadà makes clear, this initiative, like the others, has done nothing to change US corporate behavior, although the lower tax rates make it more profitable.

Jude and Pappadà focus on profit hording and profit shifting.  Profit hording refers to the accumulation of “non-repatriated earnings” by US TNCs.  Economists estimated that US firms held approximately $2.5 trillion outside the country at the end of 2017 and the Trump administration predicted that a large share would be brought back thanks to the one-time lower tax rate included in the 2017 act.  Apple alone is said to hold $252 billion in offshore accounts.

Although economists speak of corporate earnings held abroad, in fact most of those earnings are held in the US.  However, as long as those funds are not used for certain purposes, such as paying dividends to shareholders, financing domestic acquisitions, guaranteeing loans, or making investments in physical capital in the US, they can be invested in the US tax free.

As we can see in the chart below, US companies did respond to the one-time lower tax rate by “repatriating” some funds.  Dividend payouts went up, which resulted in a period of negative “reinvested earnings” in foreign affiliates.

However, as Jude and Pappadà explain:

Despite the permanent cut of the standard corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, the adjustment of repatriated dividends and reinvested earnings appears limited to the first and second quarters of 2018. Indeed, dividends decrease substantially in quarter three, whereas reinvested earnings return to positive as they were before the tax reform.

The response of US companies to the corporate tax reform mainly consisted in the partial repatriation of previously accumulated stocks of earnings (around 20 percent of the total) due to the temporary lower tax. This firms’ behavior is similar to the one observed in 2005 when another law granted US multinationals a one-year tax holiday to repatriate foreign profits at a 5.25 percent tax rate.

Thus, the tax change produced a one-time shift in a relatively small share of the non-repatriated earnings held by leading US TNCs, with stock owners the primary beneficiaries. Moreover, this shift did not change the overall size of income receipts from US foreign direct investment, as the increase in dividends was offset by the negative reinvested earnings.

If the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” is to have a long-lasting effect on the US trade balance, it needs to stop the corporate practice of tax shifting, which is how TNCs generated the huge sum of money held as non-repatriated earnings.  Profit shifting refers to the corporate strategy of using various means such as transfer pricing, often achieved using intellectual property rights over patents and trademarks, to book profits generated from US activities in a lower-tax jurisdiction.  As Jude and Pappadà point out, “six small jurisdictions (Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland), which count for less than 1 percent of the world’s population, hold 63 percent of the overall profits earned abroad by US multinationals.”

Google is, as Tim Hyde explains, one of the firms that makes good use of this strategy:

it is able to claim billions of profits in Bermuda each year (corporate tax rate: 0 percent) even though it has no office building there and not even any employees on the island. . . . this is legitimate because the rights to Google’s search and advertising technologies are technically owned by a subsidiary called Google Holdings housed in Bermuda, thanks in part to a trick called the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich. Other Google subsidiaries pay billions in royalties to the Bermudian company Google Holdings for the rights to use its technology, which was originally invented by Google employees in California and sold to Google Holdings in 2001. Those billions of profits are reclassified as Bermudian rather than American or Irish and thus not taxed.

If US firms booked their earnings in the US, rather than in a foreign tax haven, foreign direct investment receipts would decline, net US service exports would increase, and the overall trade deficit would narrow.

An Oxfam study of profit shifting by leading pharmaceutical companies shows just how important this strategy is to US TNCs and how much we lose from it:

Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer—systematically stash their profits in overseas tax havens. As a result, these four corporate giants appear to deprive the United States of $2.3 billion annually and deny other advanced economies of $1.4 billion. And they appear to deprive the cash-strapped governments of developing countries of an estimated $112 million every year—money that could be spent on vaccines, midwives, or rural clinics.

Pharma corporations’ “profit-shifting” may take the form of “domiciling” a patent or rights to its brand not where the drug was actually developed or where the firm is headquartered, but in a tax haven, where a company’s presence may be as little as a mailbox. That tax haven subsidiary then charges hefty licensing fees to subsidiaries in other countries. The fees are a tax-deductible expense in the jurisdictions where taxes are standard, while the fee income accrues to the subsidiary in the tax haven, where it is taxed lightly or not at all. Loans from tax-haven subsidiaries and fees for their “services” are other common strategies to avoid taxes. . . .

Further opportunities for avoiding taxes involve locating corporate brand or patents in tax havens, and fees for marketing, finance, or management services. For example, a pharmaceutical corporation may bill much of its R&D costs on products consumed around the globe to a subsidiary in a tax haven where R&D rights are registered, even though not a single researcher is based there. That immediately creates a cost in the country where the product is consumed, which minimizes the tax bill, and an artificial profit in the tax havens, where almost no taxes are paid in return.

As a result of this practice:

Pfizer posted losses on US operations of 8 percent in 2013, 25 percent in 2014, and 31 percent in 2015. The pattern has continued, with Pfizer posting losses of 32 percent in 2016 and 26 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, Pfizer’s international operations earned 56–58 percent in 2013–2015 and even more in the two years since (64 and 72 percent). The story is similar though less extreme for Abbott and Johnson & Johnson.

The pharmaceutical industry is no outlier.  According to a study by three economists, Thomas Tørsløv, Ludvig Wier, and Gabriel Zucman, “close to 40 percent of multinational profits were artificially shifted to tax havens in 2015.”

And, as the chart below reveals, there is no sign that passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has produced any change in US TNC profit-shifting activities.  As Jude and Pappadà discuss:

in Chart 2, we observe a change in the composition of foreign direct investment income, but the balance remains stable at its pre-reform level. Moreover, this is not associated with an increase in net exports of services. In particular, the decomposition of the services trade balance in Chart 3 shows that there has not been any increase in intellectual property charges, for which profit shifting is more relevant. At the moment, it is too soon to assess the full impact of the reform as US multinationals may take time to adjust the location of their assets and activities. However, the profit shifting decisions of multinational firms do not seem to be affected so far.

In sum, for all of Trump’s bluster, his administration has done nothing to produce a change in TNC business practices or improve the health of the US economy.  In fact, quite the opposite is true, as almost his initiatives have been designed, above all, to expand the reach and profitability of leading US corporations.

China Has An Unemployment Problem

China has an unemployment problem.  There are lots of articles and commentary about the Chinese economy, especially recently with attention focused on China’s declining rate of growth.  But have you noticed that there is rarely any mention of China’s unemployment rate?

Chinese growth is falling

China’s fourth-quarter 2018 GDP growth fell to 6.4 percent year-on-year, the slowest rate of growth since the global financial crisis. It brought full-year growth down to 6.6 percent, the slowest yearly rate of growth since 1990.  And predictions are for a significantly slower rate of growth in 2019, perhaps down to 6.3 percent.

The government has certainly pursued a number of policies over the last decade in an attempt to keep growth robust.  This includes the massive post-crisis, investment-heavy stimulus program; the more recent Belt and Road Initiative, and on-going highly expansionary monetary policy. But, the growth-generating effects of these and other government policies has steadily diminished.  As Victor Shih points out in a recent New Left Review interview:

In 2016, China needed three times as much credit to call forth the same amount of growth as in 2008. The scale of debt creation required to keep the economy moving forward has increased massively, and People’s Bank of China loans to domestic financial institutions rocketed from 4 trillion ren­minbi at the end of 2010 to 14 trillion renminbi by November 2017, a three-and-a-half-fold increase in the space of seven years. Total debt has grown from 163 per cent of GDP around 2009 to 328 per cent of GDP today, and this figure will likely continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

Strikingly few discussions of China’s declining growth trajectory include mention of the country’s unemployment rate.  One possible reason is that China’s official unemployment rate has been remarkably stable at roughly 4 percent for decades, seemingly unaffected by the economy’s ups and downs.  Unfortunately, this official rate is worthless as an indicator of the China’s labor market conditions.  In reality, China likely has a serious and growing unemployment problem.

China’s faulty measure of unemployment

As we can see from the chart below, taken from a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report on trends in unemployment in China, the country’s unemployment rate has been low and quite stable.  It rose gradually from the early 1990s to the early 2000, as the government pursued a program of privatization and marketization, and then remained largely unchanged, hovering around 4 percent, from the early 2000s to 2013.

In fact, the official rate has remained much the same over the following years. In April 2018, the government introduced a new measure of unemployment, one that it said would be more accurate. According to the new measure, the country’s unemployment rate fell to 3.82 per cent at the end of September, from 3.83 per cent at the end of June.

This stability is rather startling, considering that over the period 2002 to 2018 China’s growth rate has fluctuated considerably.  It is why Christopher Balding, in a Bloomberg article, captured the opinion of most analysts when he said:

China has long been criticized both for its obsession with GDP statistics and their quality: Pressuring cadres to meet growth targets has encouraged a risky buildup of debt and, at times, the outright fabrication of numbers. If anything, though, the quality of China’s official employment data is even worse — and the inaccuracies could have equally dangerous repercussions.

There are many problems with the government’s past and current measure of unemployment.  Perhaps the most important is that it is a really an “urban registered jobless rate.”  The urban designation is significant because of China’s household registration system (Hukou), which identifies a person by their place of birth.  Migrant workers who come to an urban area in search of work do not have an urban registration and are thus denied the benefits enjoyed by the urban Hukou population, including subsidized housing, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and minimum living standard subsidies.  China’s unemployment rate only measures the rate of unemployment of those with an urban registration.

Another problem with the official measure is that until the April 2018 revision, an unemployed urban worker had to register with their local employment service agency to be counted as unemployed.  Unemployed workers often skipped registering because the process is time consuming and the benefits small and time limited to a maximum of two years.  The revised measure is said to be based on government surveys rather than registration, but the reliability of the surveys is in doubt.

In addition, as the authors of the NBER report point out:

the total labor force, which is the denominator in the calculation of unemployment rate, is also subject to error for many reasons. One recent article that reviewed the quality of Chinese labor statistics claimed that the official unemployment rate is “almost useless.” Another important and related labor market indicator – the labor force participation rate – is not even reported in official statistics.

Accepting the urban Hukou framework, the authors made their own calculation of urban unemployment using China’s Urban Household Survey (UHS) which covers all of urban China and has been administered by China’s National Bureau of Statistics since the 1980s.  Their calculations yield, as shown by the sold dark line in the following figure, an urban rate of unemployment that is far higher than the government’s official measure (dotted black line).

The authors summarize their results as follows:

The rate averaged 3.9 percent in 1988-1995, when the labor market was highly regulated and dominated by state-owned enterprises, but rose sharply during the period of mass layoff from 1995- 2002, reaching an average of 10.9 percent in the subperiod from 2002 to 2009.

What is striking is that the high rates of unemployment from 2002 to 2009 occurred in years when official GDP growth was over 9 percent a year.

Of course, any meaningful measure of unemployment has to include all urban workers, not just the ones with an urban registration classification.  China’s migrant workforce tops 280 million according to official estimates.  The country’s four megacities, each with a population of over 10 million – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen — have huge migrant populations. For example, migrants make up more than 40 percent of Shanghai’s population, 37 percent of Beijing’s population, 38 percent of Guangzhou’s population, and 67 percent of Shenzhen’s population.

While not all migrant workers are in the labor force, most are since their migration was, more often than not, motivated by a search for employment.  And as the Chinese economy transitioned away from one anchored by state production for domestic use into one rooted in private production, increasingly for export, migrant workers became central to its operation.  For example, migrant workers dominate the manufacturing workforce at most foreign-owned export firms. They also comprise the majority of urban construction workers.

While it is true that the period of privatization was harder on state workers than migrant workers, the more recent years, marked by the country’s post-crisis slowdown in growth and exports, have definitely taken their toll on the migrant workforce.  In light of the high NBER unemployment estimates for urban Hukou workers highlighted above, it is not unreasonable to imagine an overall urban unemployment rate close to 15 percent if we include migrant workers.

It’s getting worse

As noted above, Chinese growth is slowing.  Adding to policymakers’ worries is the fact that export growth has also been trending down; exports in December 2018 fell 4.4 percent from a year earlier, with demand in most major markets weakening.  And these trends are definitely reflected in changes in company payrolls and hiring plans.

According to a report in The South China Morning Post,

Demand for labor at China’s importers, exporters, and related manufacturers fell by 40 per cent in the last quarter of 2018 from a year earlier, showing the trade war with the US has taken its toll, a survey released on Friday revealed.

The China Institute for Employment Research (CIER) at the Renmin University of China in Beijing found jobs in export-oriented regions, including Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta and Suzhou in the Yangtze River Delta, were hit hard.

A CNBC story highlights survey results showing planned layoffs in manufacturing but goes on to add:

The job losses don’t appear to be relegated to just the manufacturing sector.

“We haven’t seen this degree of jobs weakness since the (stock) market panic of Q1 2016,” Leland Miller, chief executive officer of China Beige Book, said in an email. The firm publishes a quarterly review of the Chinese economy based on a survey of more than 3,300 Chinese firms.

“In Q4 employment growth weakened across every major sector, with the ‘new economy’ — retail and services — seeing the most substantial deterioration,” Miller said. “To call it broad-based is an understatement: job growth slowed in every region we track except the Northeast.”

Regardless of official unemployment figures showing stable and even declining rates of unemployment, all signs point to the fact that unemployment is high and trending upwards.  And, that, certainly from a worker perspective, means that China has a serious unemployment problem.  Whether Chinese leaders have the commitment or capacity to offer a meaningful response, given the interests they represent and the constraints within which they operate, remains to be seen.

Capitalist Globalization Is Not Unwinding: TNCs Continue To Increase Their Power and Profits

The Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of a lengthy period of international economic growth and rapidly increasing international trade.  Now, some ten years later, economic activity, including trade and foreign direct investment, remains far below pre-crisis levels with little sign of revival.  In fact, with growth falling in Europe and Japan, and many third world countries struggling to deal with ever larger trade deficits and worsening currency instability, the weak recovery is likely on its last legs.

Some analysts now question whether the transnational corporate created globalization system, which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) calls hyperglobalization, is in the process of unwinding.  While real tensions, compounded by US-initiated trade conflicts, do exist, UNCTAD’s 2018 Trade and Development Report provides evidence showing that the system still serves the interests of the core country transnational corporations that established it and they continue to strengthen their hold over it.

Global trends: slowing growth and international trade

As panel A in the figure below shows, the years 1986 to 2008 were marked by strong global growth and export activity, with so-called “developing countries” accounting for a significant share of both, thanks to the spread of Asian-centered, cross-border production networks under the direction of core country transnational corporations. It also shows the decline in global growth and tremendous contraction in trade in the post-crisis period, 2008 to 2016.

It is this contraction in global trade, along with the decline in foreign direct investment, that has fueled discussion about the future of the current system of globalization, and whether it is unwinding.  However, trends in the export elasticity of economic output, illustrated in Panel B, are an important indicator that the system is evolving, not fraying, and in ways that benefit core country transnational corporations.

The export elasticity is a way of measuring the effect of exports on national economic activity; the greater the elasticity the more responsive national production is to exports.  What we see in Panel B is that the export elasticity of developed countries rose in the post-crisis period, while that of developing countries continued its downward trend.  This trend highlights the fact that core country transnational corporations continue to craft new ways to capture an ever-greater share of the value created by their production networks, and more often than not, at the expense of working people in both developed and developing countries.

Transnational corporate gains

Exports are dominated by large companies, overwhelmingly transnational corporations.  As the authors of the Trade and Development Report explain:

recent evidence from aggregated firm-level data on goods exports (excluding the oil sector, as well as services) shows that, within the very restricted circle of exporting firms, the top 1 per cent accounted for 57 per cent of country exports on average in 2014. Moreover, while the share of the top 5 per cent exceeded 80 per cent of country export revenues on average, the top 25 per cent accounted for virtually all country exports.

Moreover, as we can see in the figure below, the share of exports controlled by the top 1 percent of developed country and of G20 firms has actually grown in the post-crisis period.

Studies cited by the Trade and Development Report found that concentration is even greater than the above figures suggest. One found that “the 5 largest exporting firms account, on average, for 30 per cent of a country’s total exports.” Another concluded that “in 2012, the 10 largest exporting firms in each country accounted, on average, for 42 per cent of a country’s total exports.”

The next figure looks at earnings for a group composed of the 2000 largest transnational corporations, a group that includes firms from all sectors.  Not surprisingly, their earnings closely track global trade and have recently declined in line with the downturn in world trade.  However, as the table that follows makes clear, that is not true as far as their rate of profit is concerned.  It has actually been higher in the post-crisis period.

In other words, despite a slowdown in world trade, the top transnational corporations have found ways to boost what matters most to them, their rate of profit.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that transnational capital remains invested in the global system of accumulation it helped shape.

Transnational capital strengthens its hold over the system

A powerful indicator of transnational capital’s continuing support for the existing system is the steady increase, as highlighted in the figure below, in new trade and investment agreements between countries of the so-called “north” and “south.”  These agreements anchor the existing system of globalization and, while negotiated by governments, they obviously reflect corporate interests.

In fact, these new agreements have played an important role in boosting the profitability of transnational corporate operations.  That is because they increasingly include new policy areas that include “increased legal pro­tection of intellectual property and the broadening scope for intangible intra-firm trade.”  This development has allowed core country transnational corporations to secure greater protection and thus payment for use of intangible assets such as patents, trademarks, rights to design, corporate logos, and copyrights from the subcontracted or licensed firms that produce for them in the third world.  These new agreements have also made it easier for them to shift their earnings from higher-tax to lower-tax jurisdictions since the geographical location of services from most intangible assets “can be determined by firms almost at will.”

According to the authors of the Trade and Development Report,

Returns to knowledge-intensive intangible assets proxied by charges for the use of foreign [intellectual property rights] IPR rose almost unabated throughout the [global financial crisis] and its after­math, even as returns to tangible assets declined. At the global level, charges (i.e. payments) for the use of foreign IPR rose from less than $50 billion in 1995 to $367 billion in 2015. . . . a growing share of these charges represent payments and receipts between affiliates of the same group, often merely intended to shift profit to low-tax jurisdictions. Recent leaks from fiscal authorities, banks, audit and consulting or legal firms’ records, revealing corporate tax-avoidance scandals involv­ing large TNCs, have made clear why major offshore financial centers (such as Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore or Switzerland) that account for a tiny fraction of global production, have become major players in terms of the use of foreign IPR.

The growing use of this tax avoidance strategy by US transnational corporations, as captured in the figure below, highlights its strategic value to transnational capital.

Social costs continue to grow

The globalization process launched in the late 1980s transformed and knitted together national economies in ways that generated growth but also serious global trade and income imbalances that eventually led to the 2008 Great Recession.  The weak post-crisis recovery in global economic activity is a result of the fact that without the massive debt-based consumption by the US that helped temporarily paper over past imbalances, the globalized system is unable to overcome its structural tensions and contradictions.

However, as we have seen, transnational capital has still found ways to boost its profitability.  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, their success has only intensified competitive pressures on working people, raising the costs they must pay to maintain the system.  An UNCTAD press release for the Trade and Development Report emphasizes this point:

Empirical research in the report suggests that the surge in the profitability of top transnational corporations, together with their growing concentration, has acted as a major force pushing down the global income share of labor, thus exacerbating income inequality.

It is of course impossible to predict the future.  A new crisis might explode unexpectedly, disrupting existing patterns of global production.  Or workers in one or more countries might force a national restructuring, triggering broader changes in the global economy.

What does seem clear is that current economic problems have not led to the unwinding of what UNCTAD calls hyperglobalization.  In fact, the Trade and Development Report finds that “many advanced countries have since 2008 abandoned domestic sources of growth for external ones.”  The current system of globalization was structured to benefit transnational capital, and they continue to profit from its operation.  Unless something dramatic happens, we can expect that they will continue to use their extensive powers to maintain it.