No Arabic abstract
We discuss superstatistics theory of labour productivity. Productivity distribution across workers, firms and industrial sectors are studied empirically and found to obey power-distributions, in sharp contrast to the equilibrium theories of mainstream economics. The Pareto index is found to decrease with the level of aggregation, {it i.e.}, from workers to firms and to industrial sectors. In order to explain these phenomenological laws, we propose a superstatistics framework, where the role of the fluctuating temperature is played by the fluctuating demand.
Labour productivity distribution (dispersion) is studied both theoretically and empirically. Superstatistics is presented as a natural theoretical framework for productivity. The demand index $kappa$ is proposed within this framework as a new business index. Japanese productivity data covering small-to-medium to large firms from 1996 to 2006 is analyzed and the power-law for both firms and workers is established. The demand index $kappa$ is evaluated in the manufacturing sector. A new discovery is reported for the nonmanufacturing (service) sector, which calls for expansion of the superstatistics framework to negative temperature range.
Masanao Aoki developed a new methodology for a basic problem of economics: deducing rigorously the macroeconomic dynamics as emerging from the interactions of many individual agents. This includes deduction of the fractal / intermittent fluctuations of macroeconomic quantities from the granularity of the mezo-economic collective objects (large individual wealth, highly productive geographical locations, emergent technologies, emergent economic sectors) in which the micro-economic agents self-organize. In particular, we present some theoretical predictions, which also met extensive validation from empirical data in a wide range of systems: - The fractal Levy exponent of the stock market index fluctuations equals the Pareto exponent of the investors wealth distribution. The origin of the macroeconomic dynamics is therefore found in the granularity induced by the wealth / capital of the wealthiest investors. - Economic cycles consist of a Schumpeter creative destruction pattern whereby the maxima are cusp-shaped while the minima are smooth. In between the cusps, the cycle consists of the sum of 2 crossing exponentials: one decaying and the other increasing. This unification within the same theoretical framework of short term market fluctuations and long term economic cycles offers the perspective of a genuine conceptual synthesis between micro- and macroeconomics. Joining another giant of contemporary science - Phil Anderson - Aoki emphasized the role of rare, large fluctuations in the emergence of macroeconomic phenomena out of microscopic interactions and in particular their non self-averaging, in the language of statistical physics. In this light, we present a simple stochastic multi-sector growth model.
We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a perpetual money machine type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by smaller savings, booming financial profits, wealth extracted from house price appreciation and explosive debt. This is in stark contrast with the productivity-fueled growth that was seen in the 1950s and 1960s. This transition, starting in the early 1980s, was further supported by a climate of deregulation and a massive growth in financial derivatives designed to spread and diversify the risks globally. The result has been a succession of bubbles and crashes, including the worldwide stock market bubble and great crash of October 1987, the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s, the burst in 1991 of the enormous Japanese real estate and stock market bubbles, the emerging markets bubbles and crashes in 1994 and 1997, the LTCM crisis of 1998, the dotcom bubble bursting in 2000, the recent house price bubbles, the financialization bubble via special investment vehicles, the stock market bubble, the commodity and oil bubbles and the debt bubbles, all developing jointly and feeding on each other. Rather than still hoping that real wealth will come out of money creation, we need fundamentally new ways of thinking. In uncertain times, it is essential, more than ever, to think in scenarios: what can happen in the future, and, what would be the effect on your wealth and capital? How can you protect against adverse scenarios? We thus end by examining the question what can we do? from the macro level, discussing the fundamental issue of incentives and of constructing and predicting scenarios as well as developing investment insights.
We introduce an agent-based model, in which agents set their prices to maximize profit. At steady state the market self-organizes into three groups: excess producers, consumers and balanced agents, with prices determined by their own resource level and a couple of macroscopic parameters that emerge naturally from the analysis, akin to mean-field parameters in statistical mechanics. When resources are scarce prices rise sharply below a turning point that marks the disappearance of excess producers. To compare the model with real empirical data, we study the relations between commodity prices and stock-to-use ratios of a range of commodities such as agricultural products and metals. By introducing an elasticity parameter to mitigate noise and long-term changes in commodities data, we confirm the trend of rising prices, provide evidence for turning points, and indicate yield points for less essential commodities.
Financial markets display scale-free behavior in many different aspects. The power-law behavior of part of the distribution of individual wealth has been recognized by Pareto as early as the nineteenth century. Heavy-tailed and scale-free behavior of the distribution of returns of different financial assets have been confirmed in a series of works. The existence of a Pareto-like distribution of the wealth of market participants has been connected with the scale-free distribution of trading volumes and price-returns. The origin of the Pareto-like wealth distribution, however, remained obscure. Here we show that it is the process of trading itself that under two mild assumptions spontaneously leads to a self-organization of the market with a Pareto-like wealth distribution for the market participants and at the same time to a scale-free behavior of return fluctuations. These assumptions are (i) everybody trades proportional to his current capacity and (ii) supply and demand determine the relative value of the goods.