劳动力与资本的抬价之战(上)

Finance & Economics

财经版块

Labour v capital

劳动力与资本

The battle of the markups

抬价之战

Companies are raising prices; workers are demanding higher wages. Who is winning?

企业在抬高物价；工人在要求涨薪。究竟谁会是赢家？

“A good compromise”, the saying goes, “is when both parties are dissatisfied.” Dissatisfaction rages in the post-lockdown economy. Households say that price-gouging companies are jacking up prices, contributing to an inflation rate across the rich world of 6.6% year on year.

正如那句谚语所说，“良好的妥协会令双方都不满意”。疫情封锁后的经济中处处都是不满。百姓认为哄抬物价的企业抬高了价格，导致富裕国家的通货膨胀率同比达到了6.6%。

Companies bat such accusations aside, believing that they are the truly wronged party. They complain that staff have become work-shy ingrates who demand ever-higher wages. Earlier this month Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, courted controversy by suggesting that workers should moderate their wage demands—even as he failed to tell companies not to raise their prices.

企业对此说法嗤之以鼻，认为他们才是真正的冤大头。他们抱怨员工变成了不愿工作，还想要史上最高薪的白眼狼。本月早些时候，英格兰银行的行长安德鲁·贝利因建议工人降低薪资预期而招致了争议——但是他没能阻止企业抬高物价。

A “battle of the markups”, between higher wages and higher shop prices, is under way. And there can only be one winner, all else being equal.

更高的薪资与更高的物价之间的“抬价之战”正在进行。在其他条件都一样的情况下，只能有一个赢家。

Broadly speaking, economic output must flow either to owners of capital, in the form of profits, dividends and rents, or to labour, as wages, salaries and perks. Economists refer to this as the “capital” or “labour” share of gdp. Which of the two has the upper hand in the post-lockdown economy?

一般来说，经济产出要么以利润、股息和租金的形式流向资本所有者，要么以工资、薪水和津贴的形式流向劳动力。经济学家将其称为GDP的“资本”或“劳动力”份额。在疫情封锁后的经济中，这两者谁占了上风?

The Economist has compiled a range of indicators to answer this question. First we calculate a high-frequency measure of the capital-labour share across 30 mostly rich countries.

为了回答这个问题，《经济学人》编制了一系列指标。首先，我们计算了30个主要是富裕国家的资本-劳动力份额的高频测量。

In 2020 the aggregate labour share across this group soared. This was largely because firms continued to pay people’s wages—helped, in large part, by government-stimulus programmes—even as gdp collapsed. Advantage, labour.

2020年，这些国家的总劳动力份额占比大幅上升。这在很大程度上是因为即使是在GDP崩溃的时候，企业依然继续支付员工工资——大部分得益于政府的刺激计划。这时占优势的一方是劳动力。

More recently, however, the battle seems to have shifted in favour of capital. Since reaching a peak in 2020 the rich-world labour share has fallen by 2.3 percentage points.

然而，近来，斗争的天秤似乎已经偏向了资本。自2020年达到峰值以来，富裕国家的劳动力份额下降了2.3个百分点。

Frustratingly, the data only go up to September 2021—and most economists anyway argue that labour’s share is not a perfect gauge of economic fairness, since it is devilishly hard to measure. The evidence since then suggests that countries fall into one of three buckets, depending on how the battle of the markups is playing out.

令人沮丧的是，数据只维持到了2021年9月——总之，大多数经济学家认为，劳动力份额并不是衡量经济公平的完美标准，因为它极其难以衡量。自那以来的证据表明，根据抬价战的结果，各国可分为三类。

In the first camp is Britain. There, underlying wage growth is in the region of 5% a year, unusually fast by rich-world standards. But corporations seem not to have a great deal of pricing power, meaning that they are struggling to fully offset higher costs in the form of higher prices.

第一类是英国。在那里，每年的实际工资增长为5%，按照富裕国家的标准，这个增速异常之快。但企业似乎没有很大的定价权，这意味着它们正努力用涨价的方式来完全抵消成本的上涨。

Digging into Britain’s national accounts, we estimate that the nominal profit in pounds per unit of goods and services sold is only roughly as high as it was in early 2019, even as unit labour costs are rising by about 3% per year. Labour seems to be winning out at the expense of capital. Perhaps Mr Bailey has a point.

深入研究英国的国民经济核算，我们估计，虽然单位劳动力成本每年上升约3%，但每单位商品和服务的名义利润(以英镑计算)仅与2019年初大致持平。劳动力似乎在以牺牲资本为代价的方式赢得胜利。也许贝利先生有他的道理。