Voice For Liberty

Category: Economics

  • Ludwig von Mises: A quick introduction

    If you’ve heard of Ludwig von Mises and wondered why his ideas are important to freedom, here’s a chance to easily and quickly gain understanding of this important thinker and the field of Austrian economics.

    Or if you’ve not heard of or read about Mises and Austrian economics, here’s your chance. The Institute for Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank based in London, has published a short book titled Ludwig von Mises — A Primer. The book is also available to download for free, so you can read it on your computer or Ipad. The book’s author is Eamonn Butler.

    Butler (using British English) explains why Mises is important: “Ludwig von Mises was one of the greatest economists and political scientists of the twentieth century. He revolutionised the understanding of money, inflation and recessions; comprehensively refuted the arguments for socialism; and provided a devastating critique of the methodologies of mainstream economics. His contributions to the Austrian School laid the intellectual groundwork for thinkers such as F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner.”

    The book’s summary gives several points that show why Mises and his ideas are important:

    • The market system is much more efficient at allocating resources than political elections, where people get the opportunity to vote only every few years and have to choose between packages of disparate policies. Every penny spent by consumers, in countless daily transactions, acts like a vote in a continual ballot, determining how much of each and every good should be produced and drawing production to where it is most urgently required.
    • Free markets have no natural tendency to monopoly or monopoly prices; on the contrary, they have a powerful tendency towards diversity and differentiation, which bid quality up and prices down. Few cartels and monopolies would ever have come into being had it not been for government and the efforts of those with political power to stifle competition. Monopoly would be at its zenith under socialism, where all production is in state hands.
    • Policies that are intended to “improve” the market economy may in fact strangle it. Intervention may lead to unwelcome side effects that are then wrongly used to justify further interference, which in turn creates new problems, and so on. Eventually, although the economy still looks capitalist, it ends up being completely controlled by the authorities.
    • The belief that state institutions can improve on the market by taking what it does and somehow doing it better is a dangerous conceit. In the absence of the profit motive, there is no obvious way of measuring the success of public agencies in delivering their objectives. Incentives for entrepreneurship are weak, and managers are likely to become risk-averse and bureaucratic.

    One of the greatest contributions of Mises was explaining that under socialism, the lack of prices and profits lead mean there is no efficient way of allocating resources. Without markets, he said, economic calculation is impossible.

    The book may be purchased or downloaded on this page.

  • Economic competition isn’t like sports

    A while back USA Today carried an editorial by an Alexandria, Virginia school teacher that contains an unfortunate misunderstanding of the term competition as it applies to economics and education.

    In the article, Patrick Welsh makes one of the most inept analogies that I’ve ever seen. Here’s the heart of it:

    Being an English teacher, I prepared a little analogy to ask him about the rationale for labeling schools on the basis of Adequate Yearly Progress. Duncan’s biographies often mention that he was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team during the 1986-87 season, his senior year. I reminded him that that team won only seven games and lost 17. Such a record, I told Duncan, was the mark of a “persistently low achieving” team, which made no “annual yearly progress.” I meant the analogy to be humorous, but teachers sitting near Duncan said he didn’t seem to take it that way.

    I went on to say that I assumed Duncan and his teammates did the best they could with the talent they had, and that no matter what improvements they tried to make, it would be foolish to think their team could ever reach the highest benchmark in college basketball — the Final Four.

    The ineptness is this: A basketball game is a competition that is designed to produce a winner and a loser (or maybe a tie in some sports). By definition — except for ties — there can’t be two winners. Someone has to lose.

    But learning things in school is not a competition of the same type. When one student learns something (wins, in other words), it doesn’t mean that someone else doesn’t get to learn (loses). In fact, if all students master the lesson, then everyone wins, and there are no losers.

    But maybe Welsh isn’t writing about that type of competition. He might be speaking of market competition. An example of this might be schools competing with other schools for students.

    This type of competition doesn’t necessarily produce a winner and a loser. Explaining competition in the The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Wolfgang Kasper explains one of the benefits of market competition:

    Discovery. Human well-being can always be improved by new knowledge. Competitive rivalry among suppliers and buyers is a powerful incentive to search for knowledge. Self-interest motivates ceaseless, widespread, and often costly efforts to make the best use of one’s property and skills. Central planning by government and government provision are sometimes advocated as a better means of discovering new products and processes. However, experience has shown that central committees are not sufficiently motivated and simply cannot marshal all the complex, often petty, and widely dispersed knowledge needed for broad-based progress.

    Competition inspires people to improve, while central planning is the opposite.

    Applying this locally to Kansas: As Kansas has a very weak charter school law that requires charter school approval by local school boards, there are very few charter schools. Combined with the lack of school choice implemented through vouchers or tax credits in Kansas, local school districts face very little competition.

    This lack of market competition means that Kansas schools do not benefit from the dynamic discovery process that market competition fosters. The beneficiaries of this are those who favor the status quo in the Kansas education establishment and bureaucracy, including the Kansas National Education Association (KNEA, the teachers union) and the Kansas Association of School Boards (KASB). The losers are Kansas schoolchildren.

  • Why Washington only cut $38 billion: A public choice perspective

    From LearnLiberty.org: “Why do politicians never seem to cut government spending? Using public choice economics, or the economics of politics, Prof. Ben Powell shows how voters are rationally ignorant of what politicians do. This leads to a phenomenon called ‘concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,’ which favors recipients of government payments at the expense of the average taxpayer.”

    We see this type of behavior every day, in government at all levels. The people who seek subsidy at the public trough are highly motivated to seek it, and they will go to great lengths and expense to obtain it. The bureaucratic and political classes, both of which benefit from the subsidies, are motivated, too. Everyone else is less motivated, because the expense of most programs to them is very small.

    This imbalance in interests is part of the reason why government tends to grow, and why cutting anything at all is very difficult.

    The speaker in the video is Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at Suffolk University and also of The Beacon Hill Institute. He delivered a lecture last year in Kansas.

  • Liberals and economic knowledge

    Who might you guess is better informed on issues of economics: liberals who promote government intervention in the economy, or conservatives and libertarians who oppose it?

    A recent study found some surprising — or maybe not surprising — results. The study is titled Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables: A Zogby Survey of Americans. At this link you can read an abstract of the study and the entire document, too.

    An article by one of the authors that appeared in the Wall Street Journal is Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.

    In the study, researchers asked a series of questions designed to “gauge economic enlightenment.” Conclusions included these: First, and surprisingly, “for people inclined to take such a survey, basic economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college.”

    Perhaps more importantly, who scored best: conservatives or liberals? Here’s the rundown:

    Adults self-identifying “very conservative” and “libertarian” perform the best, followed closely by “conservative.” Trailing far behind are “moderate,” then with another step down to “liberal,” and a final step to “progressive,” who, on average, get wrong 5.26 questions out of eight.”

    The authors say “we should acknowledge that none of the eight questions challenge typical conservative or libertarian policy positions.”

    The authors also note:

    At least since the days of Frédéric Bastiat, many have said that people of the left often trail behind in incorporating basic economic insight into their aesthetics, morals, and politics. We put much stock in Hayek’s theory that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band, a mentality resistant to ideas of spontaneous order and disjointed knowledge. Our findings support such a claim, all the caveats notwithstanding. Several of the questions would seem to be fairly neutral with respect to partisan politics, particularly the questions on licensing, the standard of living, monopoly, and free trade. None of those questions challenge policies that are particularly leftwing or rationalized on the basis of equity. Yet even on such neutral questions the “progressives” and “liberals” do much worse than the “conservatives” and “libertarians.”

    Author Daniel B. Klein concludes in the Wall Street Journal piece: “Adam Smith described political economy as ‘a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator.’ Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us.”

  • Reisman: Social Security, Medicare must end

    Last week George Reisman published an article that should be required reading for all who care about the future of our country. Titled How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare, it will take more than a few minutes to read, but it holds the type of information we need to know as we consider reform of government entitlements. Reisman is the author of the monumental work Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

    Reisman lays out a plan that would gradually, over time, end the Social Security and Medicare systems. It’s a detailed plan, and I don’t pretend to know enough to tell if the plan would work. But it seems like it would, and the important thing is that Reisman’s plan calls for an end to these programs. Most plans call for merely bringing these programs “under control” — whatever that means. And for all the courage attributed to House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan and his Path to Prosperity Plan, he left the Social Security program for solution some other day.

    What’s important about Reisman’s article is his explanation of the harm that these two programs have caused. Here I take the liberty of rewriting two sentences of his into one: Many of the elderly and infirm are incapable of caring for themselves in large measure simply because they had been promised that the government would care for them and thus that it was not necessary for them to save.

    Social Security has reduced the need to save for one’s old age, Reisman writes: “The effect of Social Security and Medicare has been to remove the apparent need for much of that saving. Not surprisingly, in the conviction that the government was now providing for people’s old age, the rate of saving in the United States has declined precipitously over the years, falling all the way to zero in some years.”

    The saving of individuals for their retirement would greatly increase our capital stock, which is vital for economic competitiveness. In fact, Reisman writes that if American industry had access to greater capital, it would be able to operate with lower costs, allowing it to compete more effectively with foreign countries that pay lower wages. But because government diverted Social Security taxes into consumption rather than saving, that capital has not been accumulated. Instead, our capital stock is becoming depleted.

    It will become worse as young people learn they must pay off the national debt — not only the debt figures we see reported in the media, but the debt implicit in the promise of Social Security and Medicare. This debt, as we see, has been accumulated over the decades as politicians of all stripe have carried out what Reisman accurately calls embezzlement:

    Two major lessons to be learned from the financial disaster constituted by Social Security/Medicare are that the government should be prohibited from incurring any significant national debt and that a governmental promise of pensions or provision of future medical care is a category of national debt. All levels of government should be constitutionally prohibited from incurring significant amounts of debt beyond a very short term, including, above all, pension obligations of any kind.

    Hopefully, there is a special place in Hell reserved for all the political con-men and intellectual shysters of the last generations who endlessly dismissed the significance of national debts with such glib phrases as “we owe it to ourselves” and asserted that national debts need never be paid. These, of course, were the same con-men and shysters who again and again ignorantly denounced saving as cash hoarding and the cause of depressions and mass unemployment.

    And in the case of all the government officials who over a period of decades and decades knowingly used the proceeds of Social Security taxes to finance current government spending, these con-men and shysters descended to the status of major criminals, guilty of the crime of embezzlement on a scale unprecedented in all of human history. They diverted literally trillions of dollars of what people were led to believe were their savings, set aside for their future benefit, into current government spending. The spending was for projects desired by these officials and designed to keep them in office by fostering the illusion that the officials had performed the miracle of providing seemingly valuable current benefits at no corresponding cost. Of course, the reason for the apparent lack of cost was that the costs were covered by the proceeds of embezzlement.

    Besides dim prospects for the young, the mass of old people faces a grim future, too. While it is the individual who has the greatest motivation to see for their provision in old age, government has assured us that it will care for us in our old age. The individual versus the collective, in other words. While nearly every politician insists that the elderly will be cared for (“we’re not going to throw Grandma under the bus”), the political reality may become different some day as demographics shift towards a country with a higher proportion of elderly and fewer young people:

    The actual fact is that while the lives of the elderly are of inestimable value, when taken one at a time, to the individual elderly person concerned, they are of no actual value to politicians and government officials. Indeed, from the perspective of the self-interest of all-powerful officials, contemplating the land and the people of their country as their personal possessions, existing for no purpose other than their — the officials’ — glorification, the existence of the elderly stands as an actual impediment. For the elderly consume substantial amounts of the resources of the collective that the officials control, and at the same time they produce little or nothing, and no longer have any prospect of ever doing so. If they ceased to exist, the officials would have resources available to put to other uses that they would certainly judge to be more important.

    Could this lead to the “death panels” that some fear but ObamaCare supporters deny? Reisman cites a recent New York Times article titled When Ailments Pile Up, Asking Patients to Rethink Free Dialysis. The title is almost self-explanatory.

    This is just scratching the surface of Professor Reisman’s article. Reading it and understanding what government has done under the guise of caring for us, I alternate between anger and depression. For me, the saddest realization is that Social Security and Medicare have not only reduced the motivation of Americans to save, their taxes have reduced the ability of people to save, even if they want. I recommend a full reading so that all may understand what the future looks like.

  • There are a lot of government employees

    Two recent articles — one national in scope, the other covering only Kansas — tell us why our budgets are so bloated and why the private sector is struggling to survive.

    Kansas Watchdog reports “In February more than one in five non-farm employees in Kansas worked for government.” This is government all levels. Why is this a problem? Reporter Paul Soutar explains:

    Malcolm Harris, a professor of finance at Friends University in Wichita, said the level of government employment is an indicator of a bigger problem, “It tells me that we’ve got a lot of our resources going into government.”

    “Government spending squeezes resources that might be available for increasing productivity,” Harris said. “It makes us less competitive.”

    Harris said Kansas and the U.S. need to be more competitive in order to increase exports and reduce our trade imbalance.

    The second article in is the Wall Street Journal, penned by Stephen Moore. Titled We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers: More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined, it starts off with a startling statistic: “Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.”

    Later Moore highlights the decline of America’s manufacturing tradition at the expense of more government: “Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things.”

    Moore finds that since government has been hiring, and since rarely is anyone fired or laid off from a government job, many college graduates want to work for government: “Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

    Moore notes that productivity in government is measured differently than in the private sector: “But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. … The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.”

    Moore also uncovers a paradox of government employees: “Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.”

  • Latest public pension fund data show taxpayers still on hook for trillions

    By Frank Keegan

    Despite pension fund investment gains in 2010, taxpayers still owe state and municipal workers trillions of dollars for promised benefits no matter how much funds earn during the next 30 years.

    According to data for the 4th Quarter released Thursday by the U.S. Census, cash and security holdings of the top 100 public pension plans gained 7.6 percent in 2009, the fifth consecutive quarterly year-over-year increase.

    Census reported the funds reached “the highest level since the second quarter of 2008.”

    Unfortunately, pension fund managers promise taxpayers and workers they will earn about 8 percent a year every year forever, and a loss of about 28 percent at the bottom of the recession would require a 62.5 percent gain the next year to fulfill their promise.

    Spread across 20 to 30 years, funds would have to gain 9 percent to 11 percent every year to achieve their goal. That means no investment market ever could have another downturn for decades. It would require risk-free investments with the highest returns in history. Good luck.

    Even if fund managers could achieve that, taxpayers during intervening years would have to come up with about $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion every year to fill intermittent funding gaps.

    This Census survey “comprised 89.4 percent of financial activity among such entities.”

    On that basis, the total immediate investment cash and security holdings shortfall is more than $1 trillion just for pensions, which will compound to $16 trillion to $34 trillion in additional hits to taxpayers during 20 to 30 years even if fund investments realize unprecedented gains.

    Guaranteed pension costs continue to grow, and government must put taxpayer money into them every year whether investments produce promised returns or not.

    Politicians’ false promise of retiree health care benefits adds more than $530 billion to the debt as of 2008, according to the Government Accountability Office, because “most of these governments do not have any assets set aside to fund them.”

    Other estimates of the total retirement promise gap range from $1 trillion using old data and official assumptions from the Pew Center on the States, to $3 trillion to $5 trillion based on other accounting standards.

    An update of the Pew study that includes data from the beginning of the recession is due out next week. No matter what the actual number is, experts agree it will continue to grow and require more contributions from spending cuts and tax increases now.

    A report released Thursday by Standard & Poor’s confirms that despite recent gains, “The funded ratios of U.S. states’ pension funds continue decline ….”

    Credit analyst Gabriel Petek wrote in “U.S. States’ Pension Funded Ratios Drift Downward” that “Without exception, reduced pension asset values relative to estimated liabilities is placing upward pressure on the annual required contributions of state governments, compounding what is already a difficult budget cycle for most states.”

    S&P focuses on whether states will be able to pay their debts, not whether taxpayers can bleed more for the hidden tab politicians have run up. The report says:

    • Pension liabilities and current contributions are not presently jeopardizing any state’s capacity to meet its debt service obligations;
    • There is general upward pressure on recommended contributions (actuarially determined) to pension funds due to the phasing-in of market losses in 2008;
    • Pension reform efforts could help contain the rate at which some estimated long-term pension liabilities are growing. The significance of near-term fiscal relief generated from these reforms in most cases remains to be seen; and,
    • Early indications in 2011 suggest that deteriorating pension funded ratios — when coupled with a lack of full actuarial contributions — could serve as a source of potential credit pressure for some states.”

    That all adds up to major service cuts and tax increases now to make sure public workers get their pension benefits and bondholders get their principal and interest payments.

    With states facing billions in operating deficits despite revenue higher than pre-recession levels, coming up with the money they must invest now to avoid certain catastrophe in the future is going to be tough.

    Especially on beleaguered taxpayers who now know state government puts them last on the priority list behind public workers and bondholders.

    Frank Keegan is a national editor for The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, watchdog.org and statehousenewsonline.com. Any disgusted public employee, journalist, activist organization or citizen watchdog who wants help exposing government waste, fraud and abuse may contact him at: frank.keegan@franklincenterhq.org.

  • Quantitative easing: another round?

    With uncertainty on the rise globally, talk of a new round of quantitative easing — it would be QE3 — is increasingly common. QE is a policy where the U.S. Federal Reserve System creates additional money through its open market operations.

    Last year the Fed announced QE2, a policy of buying $600 billion in bonds, meaning that $600 billion in new money will have been created by the time the program ends in June. While it is commonly said that the Fed prints new money to pay for these bonds, the bonds are paid for via bookkeeping entries, sort of an electronic bill pay system between the Fed and banks who sell the bonds. That’s even cheaper than printing stacks of $100 bills. Reason explains in more detail how QE works:

    One simplified way to describe how this round of quantitative easing will work is this: The Fed doles out $600 billion in made-up money to the world’s biggest banks, who make a tidy profit on the sale and then split that profit up into bonuses. As Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon writes, “We’re not exactly helping the unemployed here.”

    The actual process is slightly more complicated, but not much more appealing. Once the members of the Federal Open Market Committee vote to buy additional bonds, the Fed schedules a series of sales, and notifies the banks on its list of primary dealers — 18 very large banks. Those banks then buy up bonds with the intention of selling them at higher rates to the Fed. And then when the scheduled sales come around, they trade their store of bonds for money that the Fed has newly created, as The Washington Post explained, “essentially out of thin air.” Interest rates go down. Inflation goes up. Investors, knowing that money is cheap now and might not be worth as much later, start to spend. The economy gets back in gear.

    At least that’s the idea. It’s not the first time the Fed has pursued the QE strategy (hence QE2), and the first go-round wasn’t an obvious success. When the financial crisis first landed, the Fed pumped $1.7 trillion into the system, yet failed to lift the economy out of its sluggish state. By the time this round of quantitative easing ends, the Fed will have added almost $3 trillion to the money supply — and that’s if it quits with $600 billion.

    One major worry is that all that extra currency will only lead to out of control inflation.

    For another explanation of QE and whether it works, a video from last November explains.

  • Please feel free to ignore Lou Dobbs

    Television personality Lou Dobbs is starting a new television show on Fox Business Network, and judging by his recent remarks, viewers will want to be cautious when relying on Dobbs for information.

    Appearing yesterday on The O’Reilly Factor, Dobbs made the same mistake that New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman made. He wrote in The New York Times that “the terror attack [of 9/11/2001 that destroyed the World Trade Center] could even do some economic good.”

    On the earthquake in Japan, Dobbs said “There is a perverse effect here, which is beneficial to the world economy. That is the materiel, the expertise, the labor that will be required to rebuild will be something of a boon to the rest of the world.”

    Where Krugman and Dobbs are mistaken is that they fail to see the unnseen effect of the economic activity that goes into recovering from disasters, whether they be natural or man-made. That is, quite simply: The effort that goes into rebuilding is not available for something else. Henry Hazlitt explains in an excerpt from his book Economics in One Lesson:

    Part Two — The Lesson Applied — The Broken Window

    Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.

    A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business?

    Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever- widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.

    Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.

    The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.

    The Blessings of Destruction

    So we have finished with the broken window. An elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments thought. Yet the broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more rampant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities. In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction.

    Ignore Bill O’Reilly, too

    On the same show, host Bill O’Reilly was doubtful about the economic benefit — which we now know is not really a benefit — of the rebuilding in Japan doing much good for America. He said “They don’t buy a lot of American stuff over there.”

    But figures from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2010 indicate that Japan is the fourth largest purchaser of American exports, ahead of the U.K. and Germany:

    Canada         248.8
Mexico         163.3
China           91.9
Japan           60.5
United Kingdom  48.5
Germany         48.2
Korea, South    38.8
Brazil          35.4
France          27.0
Taiwan          26.0