Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The Burdens to Economic Growth

During the past ten years, especially after 9/11/01, the US Government has taken a variety of measures to activate and improve the economy, including trying to control inflation, decreasing the interest rate on mortgage, and many others, which have temporarily leverage certain scenarios but have been unable to fully control the economic growth and more significantly its impact on the rest of the world, explicitly, on the global economy. In addition to the Euro crisis with the weakness in some European countries in the Euro zone, there are various other factors related to money exchange including China's valuation policies of their currency, and the trading factors indirectly affecting not only the USA but most significantly countries in developing countries in Africa and Latin America.

There various types of burdens, among them, I could highlight the following:
  1. The Legal Burden caused by Exacerbated Regulatory Compliance
    I pretty sure that the US Congress does a great job writing laws that will benefit the nation in the short and long terms. However, the implementation of regulatory compliance and deadline imposed had made the greatest impact on US economy, at least from the technology point of view. For instance, the ideal scenario that information systems, whether financial or medical or of some other sort, could legally comply with those regulations in record time, forced some sort of lack of adjustments on financial systems that had already suffered damage from the September 11 attacks. I believe that many systems were masked to comply, others were actually disrupted and never attained a perfect testing scenario, and many others are still in the process of achieving regulatory compliance. The outcome has been that the economy has also suffered from software error, beyond the human error, due to partial or inaccurate implementation, resulting in a severe factor affecting even some economic indicators, and I would even dare to say that at least some volatility is driven by this factor or as an indirect consequence. In fact, if information system failed to be accurate and does not transcend confidence this translates into information asymmetry, data inconsistency, lack of integrity, and business process error.
  2. The Political Anarchy
    In contrast, the inability of the three branches of government to further execute relevant economic measurements that would consistently improve the economy in conjunction with the social impact directed by those branches, especially, the legislative power, dramatically affected the resiliency of economic process recovery. A simple example is how much it takes to agree on a budget plan.
  3. The Homeland Security Model
    The homeland security model has increasingly become more expensive and rather than driving a good number of jobs is rather a source of continued unemployment. While we cannot compare this security model to the invasion of privacy taking place in other countries for the same reasons, it is obvious that the model precludes a good number of citizens from attaining clearance to get a job, while it also implicitly creates business constraints for corporations to hire professionals matching a specific job. The number of professional jobs created is not significant compared to the number of jobs that are automatically blocked by the above factors.
  4. Unemployment and Social Life
    Like in feudal times, machismo, feminism, and other lifestyle movements create a significant amount of investments for the private and public sectors that do not provide the best opportunities to the best candidates but rather to those that are to be protected under each ism circumstance, as convenient. So, today you could find the best men and women matching the right job unemployed simply because they did not fall in the frame of reference or at least as expected by both the private and public investment that lead to the planning and implementation of relevant failed strategies, resulting in less productivity and higher costs.
  5. The Business Landscape of Fear
    Without the individual's and business freedom to choose the best response and act economically freely, the outcome is that inaction overcomes the desire for action, in the expectation that time will make the situation better or magically heal it, which has not happened as of now.