Article / Paul Krugman: Latvia and the Romney Record

OK, not a connection you expected anyone to make. But there’s something there.

You see, there has been some back and forth over Romney’s job creation record as governor of Massachusetts. The truth is that governors don’t have much impact on such things, but for what it’s worth, MA job creation was lousy. The response of the Romney people has been to cite the state’s low unemployment rate when he left office; the response to the response is that this was due to people leaving the state.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with labor mobility; but driving down unemployment by getting people to move someplace else isn’t exactly a recipe for national recovery.

Which brings us to Latvia, where unemployment, though still very high, has come down. But this has a lot to do with a huge fall in the labor force, driven to an important extent by emigration. From Eurostat:

Again, nothing wrong with labor mobility — but if Latvia is supposed to be a role model, somehow having all of Europe move to someplace else in Europe doesn’t quite seem like a sustainable proposition …

(New York Times)