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On Monday, NHO released the document “Next Step: Roadmap for the Business Community of the Future.” Here they advocate for an innovative society that can compete with the outside world in the sale of goods and services.
It’s a plethora of good ideas for which there is widespread acceptance, such as increased competitive production and an orderly work life with a high degree of organization.
But also more controversial proposals for a smaller public sector, more exposure to competition, forced mergers of municipalities, EU membership, Northconnect cable and temporary employment opportunities.
The most popular shades of NHO.
NHOs were also the ones who predicted in 1994 that Norway would lose 100,000 jobs if we did not become a member of the EU, beyond what we wanted with the EEA agreement.
Privatization instead of industrialization
It amazes me that the desire for an innovative Norway was not reflected in NHO’s ideological innovators. Here are many things that we have heard before.
“We must preserve and create new profitable private jobs and strengthen private property across the country,” NHO Chairman Arvid Moss and NHO CEO Ole Erik Almlid write in the publication.
“We must have a better division of labor between the public and the private, to ensure income for the welfare society. Therefore, the private sector must do more tasks in the future, not less,” they continue.
“Better division of labor between public and private” shows NHO’s emphasis once again on transferring more public tasks from the state and the municipality itself to the private business sector.
That’s exactly what we’ve heard countless times before from NHO, and something seasoned economist Erik S. Reinert recently criticized NHO for.
According to him, NHO’s industrial policy strategy after the ideological shift in 1989 was to take over an increasing share of the public sector rather than industrial investment.
How innovative is the thinking in the new NHO document?
Warns against increasing own production
Now NHO will probably protest because it is not interested in industrial development.
The strategy document has several examples of focus areas.
NHO’s roadmap to 2030 calls for greater value creation with the help of the private sector.
But at the same time, be careful to warn against the desire for more own production in this country:
“The crown crisis has demonstrated the vulnerability of our tightly integrated economies and may lead to demands for greater preparedness in the form of stock and own production [min uth.]and longer-lasting restrictions on travel and migration activity. In any case, therefore, the trends towards deglobalization may become stronger. With weaker utilization of business earnings, potential growth will be lower. “
The NHO itself demonstrated how seriously they take their own strategy when in 2016 they distributed severance packages to just over 50 of their employees over 60, while employing 25 new, younger employees.
Desire for privatization: who pays?
“In the future, government spending will be higher and revenues lower. We must have a better division of labor between public and private, to ensure income for the welfare society. Therefore, the private sector must do more tasks. in the future, no less ”, emphasize Arvid Moss and Ole Erik Almlid.
Should the State then stop paying for the services provided by the private companies?
It is not specified whether the tasks that NHO wants to privatize will be on the market without public payment for services.
The strategy is aimed at: While 30 percent of the hours in Norway today are spent in the public sector, the highest among all comparable countries, the proportion will drop to 28 percent by 2030.
At the same time, it is because of the great development that NHO wants new green business development, it presupposes that the same thin state will contribute large sums to help the business community develop the new value chains.
The chapter on sound public finances establishes that the general tax burden must be reduced, so that the tax level is competitive in an international context.
NHO is right that Norway has a relatively high tax rate compared to other countries, without the organization comparing what citizens get in exchange for services in these different countries.
In the OECD, I found that the tax burden measured as a percentage of total value creation, GDP, was 39% in 2018, compared to the average among OECD member countries of 34.3%.
Norway has the ninth highest tax burden among 36 countries. But can we guess that Norwegians get more in return in the form of the welfare state than Mexicans, who at 16.1 percent win the competition for a low tax burden?
Denmark, Sweden and Finland have higher tax burdens than we do.
Regarding ease, NHO notes that the wealth tax on working capital should be abolished, while favorable tax regimes for housing investments should be tightened.
Line of work – except NHO
According to NHO, the best way to achieve sound public finances is to strengthen the line of work. More people with jobs provide greater value creation and lower social security expenses.
This doesn’t just apply to young people.
“At the same time, there are big benefits to getting older people to stay in work for a long time,” he says. NHO itself demonstrated how seriously they take their own strategy when in 2016 they distributed severance packages to just over 50 of their employees over 60, while employing 25 new younger employees.
Innovation here and there
Underneath it all is NHO’s assumption that innovation and development take place primarily in the private business sector.
The leader of the Manifest think tank, Magnus Marsdal, takes a position on a column in Klassekampen.
In creating an economic policy that must solve important social tasks, the crucial distinction is not between privately owned companies and public companies. It goes between those that are neither innovative nor productive, and those that are more corrosive than nutritious to the national economy, Marsdal writes.
According to him, it is a mistake to think that everything that is privately owned is nutritious, while everything public is consumed.
On innovation, the leader of the Manifesto writes that the invention of the Internet and the touch screen took place in the public sector.
Regarding roadmap innovation to 2030, NHO does not appear to have recovered from the illness that Erik S. Reinert diagnosed:
The business organization should not think so much about taking over public services, as about developing the industry.
Thomas Vermes comments regularly on ABC News.Read the previous comments here.
