Can Raising Japan’s Minimum Wage Accelerate Wage Growth?

By Luc Everaert and Giovanni Ganelli

Version in 日本語 (Japanese)

Japan’s minimum wage is 798 JPY ($6.52) per hour, lower than many other advanced countries, including the United States, and among the lowest relative to the average wage (see chart). For a country that needs consumers to boost spending to pull the economy out of 15 years of deflation and reinvigorate growth, a hike in wages across the board can go a long way.

Japan: Time to Load a Fourth Arrow—Wage Increases

By Luc Everaert and Giovanni Ganelli

(Version in 日本語)

Everybody agrees: wages need to grow if Japan is to make a definite escape from deflation. Full- time wages have increased by a mere 0.3 percent since 1995! For example, despite its record profits, Toyota increased its base salary only by 1.1 percent last year. The average of 219 Keidanren firms managed just 0.44 percent. Clearly, an increase in base wages, colloquially referred to as “base up”, is long overdue.

Infrastructure Investment: Part of Africa’s Solution

By Antoinette M. Sayeh

Tremendous efforts are under way to upgrade sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure. But the needs on the ground are still immense as evidenced by the frequent electricity blackouts, poor roads, and insufficient access to clean water in many countries.

Infrastructure is one of the key challenges facing policymakers in the region—I experienced it first hand when I was finance minister of Liberia before coming to the IMF. The benefits are fairly clear: with improved infrastructure, new growth opportunities in the manufacturing and services sector can be generated, barriers to intraregional trade can be reduced, and economies will be better positioned to transition from low to higher productivity activities. Without improved infrastructure, I fear the increase in productivity and greater economic diversification necessary to sustain Africa’s current growth momentum will not materialize.

In this spirit, in the latest Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa economists from the IMF’s African Department looked at progress so far in addressing the infrastructure deficit and discussed policies needed going forward.

Sins of Emission and Omission in Durban

By Ian Parry

(Versions in  عربي, 中文, Español and Français)

As we slide into another year of tough economic times, it’s easy to understand why policymakers are preoccupied with the next few weeks. But they also need to be thinking about the longer term issue of leaving the planet in reasonable shape for future generations.

Without serious efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, scientists predict that by the end of this century global temperatures could be 2.5 to 6.0^OC higher than a couple of hundred years ago. That could mean more heatwaves, more droughts, higher sea levels, more violent storms—and so on. When you start to think about the potential impact of, say, droughts on the livelihood of farmers, especially in poorer countries… well, you get the point.

While some progress was made in the latest round of United Nations’ climate change negotiations in Durban, South Africa, we saw two major omissions. There was little progress on either carbon pricing or, related, financing for action against climate change. And there was not enough recognition of what economics has to offer to help tackle the problems.

Tax Matters for Developing Countries

By Carlo Cottarelli

You hear a lot these days—not least from me—about the fiscal problems of advanced economies. But let’s not forget the fiscal problems that low-income countries face, though they are of a different kind.

For all too many low-income countries, government tax revenues are far from enough to meet the needs of their people. Some have made good progress, and this helped them weather the crisis better than many advanced economies—but there is an underlying, quiet crisis of inadequately resourced governments.

Raising Government Revenue in Africa: A Road out of Poverty

By Mark Plant

(Version in Français. Listen to the podcast in English or Français.)

Governments in Africa have a prime objective—to reduce poverty. To improve living standards and create jobs, they need to provide their citizens with better health care, better education, more infrastructure. They need to build hospitals, schools, and to pay doctors, nurses, teachers.

All this costs money. How to pay for this—in a way that is both fair and efficient—is a question that all governments face.

There are limits to how much a government can receive as grants from donors or borrow from donors or the private sector. So raising tax revenues is a necessary element for governments to spend on providing more of these essential services and, in turn, reduce poverty.

Making up for Lost Time: Getting Back on Track to the Millennium Development Goals

By Hugh Bredenkamp and Catherine Pattillo

Many of the world’s macroeconomists—including here in the IMF—are currently busy reading the daily tea-leaves, attempting to divine whether the sputtering recovery in the advanced economies will hold, and gradually pick up steam, or fall back into the notorious “double dip.”

There is a huge amount at stake here, not only for the millions of unemployed in the developed world, but also for the many hundreds of millions of our fellow global citizens in developing countries who live in dire poverty, without access to proper health, education, or sanitation. The world’s economies are now closely interconnected, and the fate of those in poor countries is tied, increasingly, to that of the richest.