I dessa tider tycks tilltron till statens förmåga att använda knappa resurser väl och skapa nya jobb total. Jag förhåller mig, liksom professor Barro och professor Sala-i-Martin, mer skeptisk. Nu läser jag i The Economist att den spanska regeringen har satsat stort för att skapa gröna jobb. Hur har det gått?
Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, a professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, has tried to use empirical data to estimate how Spain’s subsidies for renewables, which so impressed Mr Obama, will affect employment. He calculates that the subsidies for existing renewable-electricity plants, which the government has promised to pay for 25 years, will cost €29 billion. Those subsidies, in turn, have created 50,200 jobs, according to data from the European Commission. That equates to a subsidy of over €570,000 per job. Spain’s private sector, on the other hand, creates a job for every €260,000 or so invested, by Mr Calzada’s reckoning. So if the government had left the €29 billion in the hands of the private sector, it would have created 113,000 jobs with it—2.2 times as many. In other words, the government, Mr Calzada finds, is destroying 2.2 ordinary jobs for every green one it creates.
Just gröna jobb förhöll jag mig skeptisk till redan 1998.
Nonicoclolasos 