Fiscal tightening in UK recessions: 1981 and 2010 compared

I have decided to abstain from twitter conversations to protect my own wellbeing, but I made an exception for Andrew Sentance recently. The issue was the extent to which the 1981 fiscal tightening was equivalent to 2010 austerity. It was clear this needs a post to clarify things. In the charts below, I compare how various fiscal magnitudes compared to the year before financial year 1981/2 (blue) and financial year 2010/11 (red) in terms of percentages of GDP. (To be precise, the blue line subtracts X in 1980/1 from all subsequent years, where X is the share of some fiscal magnitude in GDP, and the red line subtracts X in 2009/10 from all subsequent years. Source OBR public finances databank) 

First consider public sector receipts.

The 1981 budget was a tax hike, that prompted the famous letter from 364 economists denouncing the budget. However notice that the tax hike was mostly reversed within two years. In contrast the tax hike in 2010 (higher VAT) was smaller as a percentage of GDP but it was not reversed.

With total spending we get a different picture

Under Thatcher the share of total spending in GDP stayed pretty constant. That does not mean there was no tightening, because with a large increase in unemployment we might have expected a rise in spending as a share of GDP (a point Andrew makes). But nevertheless the contrast with 2010 is stark. Public spending was the main component of fiscal tightening under Osborne.

It is worth looking at one component of spending: public investment.

Here we can see some tightening under Thatcher, but once again it was quickly reversed. Under Osborne the cuts grew over time, and by the end were twice as big as anything attempted under Thatcher.

These components can be combined by looking at net borrowing.

The Thatcher fiscal contraction was largely reversed within 2 or 3 years (almost completely reversed if we looked at cyclically adjusted figures). Osborne’s contraction grew steadily over time. It would also be a mistake to conclude that in the first two years Thatcher’s 1981 contraction was as equally severe as Osborne’s. Tax increases have a much lower impact on demand than cuts in public investment or government spending more generally.

So 2010 was not the first time a government had chosen to cut public spending in a recession, which is the reason I added the word ‘sharply’ in my tweet. It was also not the first time a UK government had attempted fiscal tightening in a recession, as 1981 shows, which is why I specifically talked about public spending in my original tweet. But perhaps the most important difference between 1981 and 2010 is longevity. Thatchers fiscal tightening in 1981 was largely reversed by1983: tightening did not just stop but it was followed by fiscal expansion. In 2010 tightening continued year after year. It is no surprise that the recovery was so weak.

Indeed, if you define an economic recovery as growth above past trends, which there is a strong case for doing, there was no recovery from 2010 onwards. Using the same definition there was a recovery after 1981, but it began in calendar year 1983. The temporary fiscal consolidation of the 1981 budget did delay the recovery for nearly two years, but partly because that consolidation was reversed the recovery eventually came. Of course monetary policy played an important role in both periods (the size of the interest rate cut was similar), but the cuts were slower under Thatcher and there was no Quantitative Easing either.

While 1981 was nothing like as bad as the austerity of 2010, it was a serious macroeconomic mistake which undoubtedly caused considerable hardship for many. It also played an important role in creating the conditions, in the mind of many Conservatives, for 2010. Conservative politicians and particularly the Institute of Economic Affairs told a false story, a story where the economists who wrote the 1981 letter were wrong and Thatcher was right. Because they kept on telling their story as if it was true some media commentators began to believe it was true. I’m sure this played some part in sustaining austerity in 2010.

The Tory party lost its way from 2010, not 2016

“I have had it up to here with the Conservative party.” So writes a one time editor of the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona. It is a good read: for example

“A chilling populism is now creeping into the language of mainstream Toryism: the language of treachery, snarling tribalism and impatience with anything that smacks of prudence, compromise or caution.”

He is talking about Brexit of course, and he is entirely right. What he misses, in my view, was that this problem did not begin with the EU referendum, but six years earlier, with the Tory ‘modernisers’, Cameron and Osborne.

I think d’Ancona gets to the heart of the problem when he writes

“By tradition, the strongest claim the Tories have had to office is a belief that ideology should be subordinated to reality. Even Margaret Thatcher – the most explicitly ideological of Conservative prime ministers – was ousted to stop the poll tax and to salvage Britain’s relations with Europe.”

Thatcher began neoliberal hegemony in the UK and a lot of the policies she introduced were popular, at least at the time. Her revolution was introduced with some caution, and when her caution ran out she was deposed. That caution, at the level of senior ministers or the party, had gone by 2010. The clearest indication of that is austerity.

Sound public finances, which d’Ancona says he supports, should never apply in the middle of a recession. We have known that since Keynes. As a result, in every post WWII economic downturn the government has focused on recovery and not the rising deficit. The single exception before 2010 was under Margaret Thatcher in her infamous budget of 1981. But that austerity was very different from 2010 for three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

1. The deficit was not targeted for its own sake, but in a failing attempt to hit a money supply target.
   
   
2. The deficit was mainly reduced by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending, which is more demand friendly. 2010 austerity preferred spending cuts to tax rises.
   
   
3. The austerity experiment was short lived and quickly reversed.

I do not want to minimise the damage done by the 1980/2 recession. My point is just that Thatcher and her ministers saw that monetarism was not working and they ditched it. Not soon enough but it was reversed. To use d’Ancona’s words, ideology was subordinated to reality.

The contrast with the austerity that began in 2010 is clear. As I never tire of saying, almost every first year economic undergraduate around the world is taught that in a recession you stimulate demand. Nowhere do the textbooks talk about worrying about the resulting deficit at the same time, because that implies austerity rather than stimulus. Unlike Thatcher, in 2010 there was no runaway inflation. The debt funding crisis that Coalition politicians were so fond of telling us about was a figment of a few City economists’ imaginations.

By 2012 it was obvious that austerity was a huge mistake. The recovery was nowhere in sight, and a key reason for this were large cuts public sector investment. It is no good complaining about the Eurozone crisis when you are cutting spending while interest rates have fallen by as much as the MPC dare. That is a schoolboy error. An imminent funding crisis implies rising interest rates on UK government debt, but by 2012 those rates were falling. The majority of academic economists who predicted that austerity would damage the recovery had been proved right. But did Cameron and Osborne change their policy, as Thatcher had done, and switch to fiscal stimulus? Of course we know they did not. Reality did not get a look in.

In economic terms austerity was the most damaging aspect of reality denial by the 2010 Tory based government. I calculated that austerity cost the average household £10,000, but the true figure may be much more if we allow for the damage austerity did to the supply side of the economy. It is certain that cuts to social care and the NHS cost lives: it is just a question of how many thousands of lives we are talking about. Austerity represented political deceit at its worst. Voters accepted nonsense pushed by the government about its credit card, and this allowed Tories to achieve an ideological goal of a smaller state which was otherwise unpopular.

If that was not bad enough, austerity also helped sow the seeds of Brexit. When people in communities that had been left behind voted for Brexit they said things couldn’t get any worse, and they said that in part because of austerity. But this was not the only grand deceit of this Tory led administration. They established a target for immigration that they had no intention of meeting because they knew the damage meeting that target would do. But their rhetoric that immigrants were responsible for the ills caused by austerity was a major reason that Cameron lost his referendum. A Prime Minister who had falsely told the nation why it was essential to reduce immigration had no answer to those who pointed out it could not be completely controlled because of Freedom of Movement.

Cameron did not just make a mistake in allowing a referendum in the first place. Through his ruinous policy of austerity and his demonisation of immigrants he ensured that referendum would be lost. d’Ancona is right that Europe brings out the worst in the Tory party. It shows how Tories can elevate ideology and party above the interests of the country. But that did not start in 2016, but with the destruction it has sown since 2010.

The biggest economic policy mistake of the last decade, and it had nothing to do with academic economists

"The biggest policy mistake of the last decade" is the title of an article by Ryan Cooper, and the mistake is of course austerity. (It is a very US focused piece, so Brexit is not on the map.) Cooper goes through all the academics who gave reasons why austerity was necessary and how their analysis later fell to bits. (How much they fell to bits is still a matter of dispute as far as these authors are concerned.)

Here is his concluding paragraph:

“As we have seen, the evidence for the Keynesian position is overwhelming. And that means the decade of pointless austerity has severely harmed the American economy — leaving us perhaps $3 trillion below the previous growth trend. Through a combination of bad faith, motivated reasoning, and sheer incompetence, austerians have directly created the problem their entire program was supposed to avoid. Good riddance.”

There is a lot I could say about the details of the article, but this conclusion is essentially correct, and it applies at least as much to the UK and to the Eurozone countries. With Trump’s large tax cuts for the rich paid for in large part by borrowing, the Republicans can no longer credibly tell everyone austerity is essential. In contrast the political right’s enthusiasm for austerity in Europe remains strong.

Reading the article brought back memories of my first year or two writing this blog, where I became part of a mainly US blog scene of mainstream academics opposed to austerity, lead by Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong. We were trying to take down the academic arguments for austerity, and we succeeded. As Cooper’s article suggests it was not a very difficult task. Sometimes very senior economists who should have known better made simple mistakes of the kind I discussed here. On other occasions, like the predictions of massive inflation from Quantitative Easing that Cooper discussed, events quickly proved the Keynesians correct. Only in the case of the studies from the two pairs of Alesina and Ardagna and Reinhart and Rogoff was additional research required to challenge their conclusions.

As far as us Keynesians were concerned, the intellectual battles were won by the end of 2012 if not before. In particular Paul De Grauwe’s influential analysis of why Eurozone countries were experiencing a debt crisis, pointing to the lack of a sovereign lender of last resort, put an end to the academic credibility of ‘we are going to become like Greece’ stories. When the ECB introduced OMT in September 2012 and the Eurozone debt crisis came to an end De Grauwe was proved right. In 2013 Krugman wrote of austerity:

“Its predictions have proved utterly wrong; its founding academic documents haven’t just lost their canonized status, they’ve become the objects of much ridicule.”

What we didn’t know for sure then was the lasting damage that austerity would bring, and which Cooper notes.

I want to add two important points that Cooper’s article does not cover. The first is that although by 2013 most academics had become convinced about the austerity mistake (it was always a minority view anyway), economic journalists in the non-partisan media could not recognise that because the politicians were continuing to implement the policy. Here is Robert Peston in 2015:

“And before I am savaged (as I always am) by the Krugman crew of Keynesian economists for even allowing George Osborne’s argument an airing, I am not saying that the net negative impact on our national income and living standards of cutting the deficit faster is less than their alternative route of slower so called fiscal consolidation. I am simply pointing out that there is a debate here (though Krugman, Wren-Lewis and Portes are utterly persuaded they’ve won this match – and take the somewhat patronising view that voters who think differently are ignorant sheep led astray by a malign or blinkered media).”

We now know that voters were indeed being led astray by a malign or blinkered media, or at least a media that did not have the courage to call the result of the academic debate.

The second point is that this academic debate had zero impact on politicians. In that sense Cooper’s article is of purely academic concern. Austerity was not begun because politicians chose the wrong academic macroeconomists to take advice from, and the fact that the Keynesians won the debate therefore had no impact on what they did. The academic debate was in this sense a complete sideshow. I think many Keynesian academics understood that: it was a fight we had to win but we were under no illusions it would change anything. I wrote in 2012 that if all academics were united we might have an impact on public opinion, but that illusion did not last very long and Brexit showed it was indeed an illusion.

I think this lack of influence that academic economics can have is not understood by many. It often suits some heterodox economists to pretend otherwise. Economists can be influential, but only when politicians want to listen, or the media is prepared to confront them with academic knowledge. For example politicians have not done nearly enough to ensure another financial crisis does not happen, but that isn’t because economists have told them not to or have not shown them how to do so. It is because politics prevents it happening.

The reason why economists like Alesina or Rogoff featured so much in the early discussion of austerity is not because they were influential, but because they were useful to provide some intellectual credibility to the policy that politicians of the right wanted to pursue. The influence of their work did not last long among academics, who now largely accept that there is no such thing as expansionary austerity or some danger point for debt. In contrast, the damage done by austerity does not seem to have done the politicians who promoted it much harm, in part because most of the media will keep insisting that maybe these politicians were right, but mainly because they are still in power.  

The micro incompetence of UK austerity

I have, for obvious reasons, talked a great deal about the macroeconomic incompetence of austerity, and how it probably cost each UK household around £10,000 in lost resources on average. I have also talked about how it was based, at least after 2012, on political deceit: a pretense that cuts were necessary to reduce government debt when in reality the aim was to reduce the size of the state. (If the priority really was the deficit, why all the tax cuts?) What I have talked less about is the microeconomic incompetence in the way this reduction in the size of the state was achieved.

To many that may seem an odd thing to discuss. After all, isn’t how government spending is allocated between health, education, defence etc inevitably a political decision. But that is not how an economist would think about it. People have preferences between spending on the various goods that are allocated by the state, and so it is perfectly reasonable to ask how good a job the state does in getting the right allocation i.e. in reflecting society’s needs and preferences. If it wasn’t doing this to the first approximation (and allowing for slightly different preferences depending on political orientation) you could legitimately question whether the state was doing a good job. One of the pieces of academic research that has always stuck in my mind is a 1984 paper by Ron Smith and colleagues, who found that allocation did reflect needs and costs once you allowed for bureaucratic inertia.

As a result, it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether an attempt to shrink the state has preserved broadly the correct allocation or distorted it. After all, if a Labour government substantially increased government spending in random ways with no coherent plan everyone would be quite right to complain. So exactly the same should be true in reverse: if you are going to shrink the state you should do so in a planned way.

There was of course no public plan set out in 2010 discussing what parts of the state should be smaller and why. Was there a secret plan that guided Osborne and the Treasury’s decisions? Perhaps he had to keep his plan secret because if it had ever been made public it would have been very unpopular. As I have noted many times, there has never been in the UK more than 10% of the population that wanted a smaller state. That is why state reduction had to be done by deceit, as a few journalists have been prepared to acknowledge in public. But if you are going to do something by deceit, and have kept your master plan of where the state should be shrunk secret, you probably deserve people like me making the assumption that there is no plan beyond political expediency. So I will assume that the only plan was to make the cuts in areas that they could get away with.

Under certain assumptions, that idea of cutting until the pips squeak is in itself not a bad method. In particular, if you think that there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in public spending (because of lack of competition etc), then this mechanism may be one way of getting rid of that waste and inefficiency. However some of the assumptions required for that method to work show clearly why it is in fact a very bad method. One assumption is that each part of public spending has an equal political voice, and will shout only as loud as the real pain of cuts. The real world is just not like that.

Take pensions and social care as two examples. The state pension has been austerity free, probably for the simple reason that pensioners tend to vote Conservative. So why has social care, which is used by the same people, been subject to savage cuts that are highly likely to have led to many premature deaths? The answer is in part that people do not have full information: the papers they read do not talk about cuts to social care very much. It is also because social care is the responsibility of local government, and so cuts can be blamed on local councillors rather than central government.

I started thinking about this again after reading an article by John Harris, who discusses the perilous state of UK local government. As he says, political “journalists who work themselves into a lather about this or that item of Westminster gossip hear the dread phrase “local government” and glaze over.” Do you know who the minister for local government is? I had to look it up. So the feedback mechanism that tells the Chancellor and the Treasury that cuts in local government have gone too far is largely absent and can be neutralised. As a result, that is one place where further cuts are still in the pipeline.

Groups that have been particularly badly hit by cuts, the disabled and poor, also happen to be those with little political voice. In some other areas the extent to which cuts took place depended on simple spin. Because of the spin that the NHS budget had been protected, it suffered sharp cuts because it normally grows substantially for various good reasons. Is this all part of a master plan, or just what was politically convenient?

Economists go on about the efficient allocation of resources, and that should apply just as much to public goods as private goods. The fact that this allocation is achieved through political decisions rather than responses to price signals makes it easier to get things wrong, but it should not mean allocations are random. So any departures from a reasonable allocation due to a programme of cuts which has been and is being allocated based on essentially arbitrary factors should be a major cause of concern. In simple english, not only was the Conservatives’ attempt to shrink the state done at the worst possible time for the economy as a whole, it has also been done in an incompetent way in terms of how spending is allocated.

Disentangling the UK productivity problem

As it has become clear to the non-FT/Economist media, and as it has been clear to economists for a long time, productivity growth is a far more important problem for the UK than the deficit. However I think discussion can get confused if it fails to distinguish between three aspects to the problem.

First, the UK is not alone in seeing large falls in productivity growth. Now some of that may be related to the global financial crisis, but not all of it is. As this chart taken from the excellent paper by Richard Jones shows, in the G7 productivity appears to have been declining since at least the 1980s.

For simplicity’s sake I will call that the global productivity decline.

The second element in the UK’s productivity performance is a structural weakness relative to other countries. I know of no better way of convincing you this exists than this chart, taken from the latest OECD survey of the UK economy.

The robots may be coming to take our jobs, but at this rate UK manufacturing will be the last place this will happen. As this report and the Jones paper also show, the UK’s R&D expenditure is weak and below the OECD average. Polly Toynbee shows it is no better on the workforce training side. [1] 

I am fairly sure, however, that what we have seen since the Global Financial crisis is an additional third weakness. Here is the annual growth in UK output per hour.

The historic trend, which showed no clear sign of following the global trend and declining after 1980 (a clear UK success), is around 2.25%. Now it is clearly possible to argue that this data shows a decline from this long run trend starting in the mid-2000s based on this aggregate data. If you factor in as well that these aggregate numbers are flattered by unsustainably fast productivity growth in financial services from 2001 to 2006 then you can maybe detect the beginning of a slowdown from the start of the millennium. This would not be surprising, as it would be very hard for the UK to buck the slowdown in global productivity for very long.

Having said all that, what happened after the Great Recession is something quite different. But it is wrong to view this period as just one of constant zero growth gloom. Productivity began to recover in 2010 and 2011, to levels that do not look too bad by international standards, but hit negative territory in the following two years. Another, this time more modest, two year recovery was followed by another collapse in 2016. This does not look like just the global productivity decline plus some additional structural weakness. Achieving negative productivity growth two years running indicates a deeper malaise.

This is why I think there is a third factor behind this terrible performance. To explain it we need to start thinking about productivity growth as not some kind of manna from heaven, churned out by our universities, or even the product of R&D by firms, but also as something akin to an investment. If you are confident of future growth and profitability, you are more likely to invest in productivity improvements (which may or may not involve physical investment) than if you are unusually uncertain or gloomy.

After recessions are over, productivity usually picks up. Firms understand the business cycle, and in UK business cycles over the last 40 odd years recessions are followed by strong growth. So when recessions have levelled out, it makes sense for firms to invest in productivity improvements. That is one reason why productivity growth resumed in 2010 and 2011. The only problem is that something quite unexpected happened. Growth did not return at all. At one stage people were talking about a second UK recession. Firms became both uncertain and gloomy, and productivity growth stopped. That shock, which we can reasonably call austerity, was the first shock that hit the economy after the GFC.

By 2013 it looked like the recovery had finally arrived. Productivity growth could resume, but maybe more cautiously than before. And that caution was justified because in the election of 2015 a new uncertainty arose: the possibility of Brexit. Brexit would be one of the most profound shocks to hit the UK for decades: certainly for firms involved in trading or international supply chains and probably wider than that. Just as the costs of waiting are small for a large investment decision when there is serious uncertainty, so Brexit meant that productivity improvements would once again be put on hold.

Thus we have three aspects to the UK’s productivity slowdown. The first is the global slowdown, which we managed to avoid for two decades but no longer. The second is a long term structural weakness in developing and applying new technology. The third is the impact of two shocks, austerity and Brexit, which has caused UK firms to put productivity improvements on hold and become very gloomy about the UK’s future. I somehow doubt that we can start doing something about the UK’s long term structural weaknesses while we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot with crazy policies like austerity or Brexit.

[1] If you think the budget made a significant difference to all this, read Anna Valero here       

The impact of austerity in the UK

When they do their forecast evaluation report, the OBR also look at the impact of fiscal policy on GDP. Here is the relevant chart from their report published yesterday.

There is a useful innovation compared to previous years, which comes close to an something I suggested a few months ago. The orange bar shows the impact of fiscal measures implemented in that year. The total effect of fiscal policy is this plus the impact of previous fiscal policy actions unwinding.

Suppose for example that fiscal policy reduced GDP by 1% in year 1, but its impact on the level of GDP was expected to decay by half in year 2. If no fiscal policy was enacted in year 2, then fiscal policy in year 1 would increase growth in year 2 by 0.5%. Why might the impact of fiscal policy on the level of GDP decay over time? The obvious explanation is that monetary policy ensures that it does by stabilising the level of GDP. This assumption is problematic when interest rates are stuck at their lower bound, which is why it is useful to publish the within year estimates as well as the total estimates,

You can see when this matters from 2012 onwards. We have a run of years where the total impact of austerity on growth is zero or positive, but only because of the unwinding of previous austerity. If monetary policy, or anything else, had not been able to offset earlier fiscal tightening, then instead the impact of austerity would be to reduce growth in all those years. In that (extreme) case the level of GDP in 2016/17 would be over 4% below what it would otherwise have been without any fiscal tightening from 2010/11.

As the OBR’s assessment of fiscal impact is in their publication on forecast errors, they naturally talk about whether there is any relationship between the two. This year they included this chart.

It is important to understand what we are looking at here. It is not whether there is a correlation between fiscal consolidation and GDP. As we have seen the OBR assumes there is, and indeed their calculations were the source of my estimate that the average household had by 2013 lost a total of £4,000 worth of resources as a result of austerity. The foolishness of austerity in 2010 was not that the OBR underestimated its impact, but that it left us vulnerable to negative shocks because interest rates were at their lower bound. The shock that hit in 2012 was the Euro crisis and the impact of austerity there.

What the chart above might tell us is whether the OBR have in fact underestimated the impact of austerity i.e the numbers in Chart E are too small. Each year there are hundreds of potential reasons for forecast errors, of which underestimating the impact of austerity is just one. So the best we can expect, if the OBR are underestimating the impact of fiscal policy, is a negative relationship going through zero between the two variables in Chart D but with lots of random variation on top. That is what we see in Chart D.

Austerity will only end when our leaders start being honest

Austerity was the underlying motivation for starting this blog. Sometimes I think everything that I, Paul Krugman and many others have written over the last six or more years has fallen on deaf ears. Take two recent pieces of evidence: this FT article by Nicholas Macpherson, ex permanent secretary at the Treasury, and this interview of the Chancellor by Andrew Marr.

In talking about Osborne’s fiscal consolidation that began in 2010, Macpherson says: “With hindsight, there was a case for going further faster.” His rationale is that the public like a dose of austerity, but tire after a time. At no point does he mention the economy (a recovery that stalled from 2010 to 2013, and then only started growing at trend thereafter), or monetary policy (interest rates were stuck at their lower bound). His desire for a shorter, sharper fiscal shock would have almost certainly produced a second recession.

I calculated that the fiscal consolidation that did take place cost the average household at least £4,000 in lost resources. This is based on OBR numbers, and assumes (as the OBR does) that the economy recovers quickly from any fiscal consolidation. This latter assumption looks very shaky indeed. Once you stop making it, the costs of austerity become horribly large. Not a word about this from Macpherson, which allows him to make the ridiculous argument that we should have had a shorter sharper consolidation.

One of the other ridiculous things Macpherson says is that, from 2010 to 2016, the UK did not even experience austerity. He justifies this because the debt to GDP ratio over this period rose. I’ve heard similar things in comments on my blog, presumably because of what Conservative politicians or their apologists say in the press. The statement confuses levels with rates of change, whether you are talking about the impact on the economy or on individuals. This is first year undergraduate stuff.

Philip Hammond said in his interview that a deficit of 2.5% is not sustainable. The normal definition of sustainability is a deficit that keeps the debt to GDP ratio constant. The current debt to GDP ratio is 86.5%. To work out roughly what the sustainable deficit is, divide the debt level by 100 and multiply that by the expected growth rate of nominal GDP. That means that today a deficit of 2.5% of GDP would be sustainable as long as nominal GDP grew at about 3%. So his statement that a deficit of 2.5% is not sustainable simply looks wrong.

You could rationalise this by saying that he believes our current debt to GDP level is not sustainable, and that therefore he wants to reduce it, but if that is what he means he should say so. Instead it seems that he wants to pretend that the government is like a household, and so therefore there is some reason why a deficit of zero is desirable. Of course Hammond does not mention interest rates either. And he knows that, in an interview like this, he can get away with anything involving economics or numbers.

Austerity has been supposedly dying since after the Brexit vote, but that just reflects misleading or dishonest reporting. As Torsten Bell says, for most people austerity means cuts to public spending, and for public sector workers and those on low incomes there is more austerity to come. Hammond also said Labour’s proposed fiscal policy would be “catastrophic for the country”. I suspect this kind of nonsense hyperbole, frequently invoked by the right wing press, has now become counter-productive. In reality at the heart of Labour’s fiscal policy is a fiscal rule which takes the government’s role in the economy seriously, rather than reduce it to the budget of a Swabian housewife. I cannot wait for the day that becomes the UK government’s fiscal rule, and we can move discussion of UK fiscal policy away from numbers 'not adding up' and back into the 21st century.

When is an economic recovery not a recovery?

This post may seem to be unusually pedantic, but please be patient

What do we mean when we say the economy is recovering from a recession? Do we mean it has started growing again, or do we mean it is returning to its pre-recession trend? Brief research suggests there is no standard definition, but Wikipedia is clear it is the latter:

“An economic recovery is the phase of the business cycle following a recession, during which an economy regains and exceeds peak employment and output levels achieved prior to downturn. A recovery period is typically characterized by abnormally high levels of growth in real gross domestic product, employment, corporate profits, and other indicators.”

The second sentence is crucial here. All economies grow on average: they have a positive trend growth rate. An economic downturn (or worse still a recession) involves the economy dipping below trend (or in a recession not growing at all). Typically whenever that has happened in the past, most economies make up for the growth they lost in the downturn, by growing more rapidly than trend once the downturn is over. This had certainly been true for the UK. We expect economies to grow over time because of technical progress, so it seems almost obvious that a recovery must involve above average growth until we return to something like an underlying trend.

Imagine a 5,000 metres race. Suppose an athlete trips and stumbles, leaving the main pack behind. If 5 minutes later I said the athlete was recovering, would you think this meant that they were getting back to their previous pace but still well behind the main group, or that they were getting back in touch with the main pack? I suspect you would think it meant the latter, and you would call a complete recovery when they were back within the main group. If you think about the main group as the underlying trend path of the economy, then a recovery in growth means getting back towards this trend path.

For this reason I would define a recovery from recession as above trend growth, and I think most macroeconomists would do the same. Here is recent quarterly growth in UK GDP per head.

The red line is the pre-crisis trend growth rate. You can see from this that only 2014 could possibly be called a recovery, and even that is a bit of a stretch. The UK is far from unique in this respect, but unlike other countries the UK economy has a pretty clear and unchanged trend growth rate since the 1950s. Until now that is. This global lack of recovery begs many important questions, which those who read economics blogs will be very familiar with: has the financial crisis had a permanent negative effect on productive potential, was the pre-crisis period really a disguised boom, are we suffering from secular stagnation, what role did austerity play?

Yet all of these important issues are sidelined in popular discussion if we misuse the term recovery, and instead describe any positive growth after a recession as a recovery. This is not a problem for economists, who tend to talk numbers, but it does matter for the public debate. I cannot help feeling that calling any positive growth after a recession a recovery also adds to a sense of disconnect people have, particularly when (as in the UK) there has really been a recovery in employment, such that productivity has been virtually flat. People ask how come there has been a recovery and yet my wages are still so much lower in real terms than they used to be?.

When the underlying trend may have slowed or shifted, then it becomes difficult to know what is or is not a recovery, but that is no reason to misuse the term. When we are talking about the past, then things should be clear. Here is the same data for 1981.

It is obvious from this data that the recovery from the 1980 recession only really began in 1983. The two previous years saw as many periods of below trend growth as above trend growth: given normal growth, the economy was effectively standing still. Unless, of course, you have a political point to prove. In 1981 the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher raised taxes substantially in the Spring Budget, despite just seeing 5 quarters of falling output per head. They increased taxes after falling output because they wanted to reduce the budget deficit. 364 academic economists quickly wrote a letter denouncing the policy - a Brexit like majority at the time.

In 2006 Philip Booth of the Institute of Economic Affairs wrote this:

“The economic recovery that the 364 said would not happen began more or less as soon as the letter appeared.”

This sentence has been repeated time after time by right wing economists and politicians: so often that it is now repeated as fact by BBC journalists. It has become what I call a politicised truth: something that is false but is perceived to be true by journalists who talk to politicians but not academics. And the statement that the recovery began as soon as the letter appeared is simply false if you use the term recovery properly: the recovery began a year and a half later. Had fiscal policy not been tightened in the 1981 budget, the recovery might have begun earlier than the end of 1982. In that sense, the economists were vindicated by subsequent events.

In 2010, George Osborne was warned by many academic economists - almost certainly a majority at the time - that embarking on austerity so soon after the recession was folly. But, just as in 1981, he wanted to reduce the deficit. It is not difficult to imagine that as he pondered these warnings from academics, he thought to himself that Margaret Thatcher got the same advice in 1981 and everything he had read said the advice was wrong because the recovery started immediately after taxes were increased. He would have been emboldened to do the same, with what we now know were disastrous consequences. Just two years later, GDP per head had lost another 3% or more relative to trend.

This is partly a story about the dangers of propaganda that you begin to believe yourself. But it is also about the potential ambiguity of one single word: recovery.