Different kinds of fiscal stimulus

Newspaper day. In the Guardian I have a piece that looks at how we should regard any tax cuts that Boris Johnson may announce as part of the forthcoming election. And make no mistake tax cuts are coming (we already know they intend to cut the tax on petrol), because the spending review signalled that the governments rule will change, as Chris Giles discusses in a good article in today’s FT in which I among other economists are quoted. .

In the Guardian piece I argue that tax cuts are a bad idea because in the context of us leaving the EU they will almost certainly produce unsustainable increases in the deficit without much of a compensation in higher output. As I say in the Giles FT article, policies that if unchanged would lead to steady and permanent increases in debt to GDP are not a good idea. That in turn will mean that at some stage either taxes will have to rise or we will be back to austerity.

But why did I also imply that Wednesday’s spending review was to be welcomed? Are not spending increases and tax cuts not two sides of the same fiscal stimulus coin? There is the obvious point that in many areas public spending cuts have gone way too far. But there is a macroeconomic point as well. Spending increases directly raise aggregate demand by the same amount. Things like income tax cuts, particularly if they go to the better off, are largely saved. (A number of around a third is commonly found in empirically studies for the amount actually spent.) So you get less demand stimulus for your money.

According to calculations done in a separate article by the Financial Times, Labour’s likely plans will also raise the ratio of debt to GDP. But if you look beyond the ‘scare’ headline, the reasons are quite different. Labour will still meet its fiscal rule for current spending, but the amount of investment planned could lead to the ‘falling debt to trend GDP’ part of the rule being breached. These calculations need to be taken with a pinch of salt, because they assume the additional investment produces no increase in GDP, and therefore no higher tax take. Even the IFS when they evaluated Labour’s election plans in 2017 allowed additional public investment to boost GDP. Which is just one reason why the FT’s analysis annoyed the large number of economists, including me, who signed this letter published in the FT today.

I didn’t like the FT write up for another reason. It seemed to be designed simply to be one more fiscal scare story. If I had been writing this I would have asked whether, if the policy did in fact break the debt to trend GDP part of the rule because of more public investment, that part of the rule made sense. A company increasing investment would happily increase its debt to sales ratio if it did a lot of investment, as would an individual increase their debt to income ratio when buying a house. Perhaps that part of Labour’s fiscal rule is a hangover from the days when mediamacro thought government borrowing was a bad thing, even when it was additional investment?

That is the key difference between Labour and the Conservative policies. If the debt to GDP ratio rises because of supposedly permanent tax cuts, that leads to steadily increasing debt to GDP and so cannot be sustained. Running public investment at high levels because you are restoring the public capital stock and as part of a Green New Deal may be prolonged but it is not permanent, and temporary increases in debt to GDP to finance investment make sense.

Brexiters are stopping Brexit because they need to believe in the fantasy of Global Britain

It now looks like May will not get a chance to put her deal to parliament for a third time today, thanks to a ruling from Speaker Bercow. Yet while some compare Theresa May’s relentless and humiliating quest to get her deal passed by parliament to the Black Knight from Monty Python’s the Holy Grail, and Bercow believes the deal has to change for it to be voted on again, there would have been a critical difference this time.

Previously rejection has meant nothing except that we get closer to leaving without a deal. No deal is what economists might call the ‘bliss point’ of many Brexiters. The outcome most Brexiters want is what they call a ‘clean break’ with the EU. Before parliament agreed to delay rather than crash out, it was obvious the Brexiters would vote against May’s Withdrawal Agreement.

If the Withdrawal Agreement had been voted on today (and May could well have pulled it herself anyway because she believed she would lose again), rejecting it would have almost certainly meant a long delay to Brexit rather than crashing out. That may be a crucial difference for many Brexiters, including the DUP. A few have already said that they would have supported May’s deal this time, and others appear to be looking for ways to change their minds. So the vote would have been closer than last time it it had been held.

Given this, I have never understood why May kept No Deal on the table for so long. It was obvious that most Brexiters preferred No Deal and would therefore inflict embarrassing defeats on the Prime Minister. In contrast the threat of No Deal does not seem to have kept the few MPs on the opposite wing on board. All I can assume is that she really believed the David Davis mantra that the EU would cave at the last minute for fear of the impact of no deal. If so that was a huge misjudgement, to be added to the already long list of huge misjudgements she has made over Brexit.

Now she has finally said a long delay is the alternative to her deal passing, the Brexiters would have a real dilemma if the deal was voted on again. A long Brexit delay does not take No Deal completely off the table, but it makes it much less likely than before. It also increases the possibility of a second referendum. To understand the dilemma the Brexiters would have if May were allowed to and had put her deal to parliament for a third time, we have to enter the make-believe world of ‘Global Britain’. Of course Global Britain appeals to the English nostalgia for empire that runs deep within Brexit, but to most Brexiters it is much more than that.

Conventional economic analysis tells us that leaving the EU’s Customs Union and Single Market will reduce the amount of trade the UK does with the rest of the world. The reasons are obvious, and I think are privately accepted by most Brexiters. Their main line of defence during the referendum was that the EU would give us all the benefits without the costs, which we now know conclusively is not true. While some Lexiters might be attracted by the idea of a less global UK (because they blame globalisation for deindustrialisation), Brexiters do not want less trade. Their idea of Global Britain was to do more trade with non-EU countries to offset, in the longer term at least, the loss of trade with the EU.

The Irish backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) effectively rules out Global Britain. Most trade deals involve tariff reductions, and if the UK is in the EU’s Customs Union it cannot unilaterally reduce its tariffs to make new trade deals. Theresa May and Liam Fox may pretend otherwise, but most Brexiters know this to be the case. The more May moves to appease the DUP by promising that EU rules in Northern Ireland will also be adopted by the rest of the UK, she restricts yet further the scope of independent (from the EU) UK trade deals. Without tariff reducing trade deals with emerging countries and the US, Brexiters believe there will be a decline in the amount of trade the UK does with the rest of the world, and that will be harmful to the UK economy.

That is why some Brexiters insist that May’s deal is worse than staying in the EU. But others will point out that the WA does allow the UK to move away from many of the rules of the Single Market, which in their eyes is an important part of Brexit. A few may pretend to themselves that the backstop can still somehow be subverted once we have left, or even that No Deal can still be achieved after approving the Withdrawal Agreement by rejecting enabling legislation. They may say that it would be extremely ironic and embarrassing if Brexiters by their own actions stopped Brexit happening. Those still opposed to May’s deal will respond that those who vote for it own it, and if trade and the economy subsequently decline voters will blame those who voted for May’s deal.

Behind all this is the influence of Conservative members. The departure of Nick Boles, who left his Conservative Association before he was pushed, reflects a new mood of militancy among the Tory grass roots. Boles had voted for May’s deal, and his crime in the eyes of party members was that he also campaigned against no deal. With some of the Brexiters hoping to succeed May, their decision is all about pandering to this electorate.

In truth this debate is upside down compared to the real world. I describe Global Britain as make-believe because all reputable studies suggest new trade deals cannot come close to offsetting lost EU trade. A key reason is what economists call gravity. Gravity is the observation that countries trade more with their neighbours than those far away, a robust finding that appears to hold despite falling transportation costs. That means that even if the UK after Brexit could get lots of tariff reduction deals with countries outside the EU (a big if), this would not come close to making up for the lost trade with the EU. The government’s own analysis comes to the same conclusion. By keeping us in the Customs Union, May’s deal actually helps the economy, although as I outlined last week leaving the Single Market is still very costly.

Brexiters always refer to how much faster countries outside the EU are growing. But this is like giving up your solid 40 hour a week day job to work just one hour a week for a rapidly expanding firm for the same hourly pay. Because the firm is rapidly expanding you could be working 2 hours a week within 10 years! This is something few in their right minds would do in real life, so why should we do the equivalent as a country?

Brexiters prefer to ignore the analysis of the overwhelming majority of economists, and instead look to the tiny group of Economist for Free Trade (EFFT). But as Chris Giles has recently shown, if you look at how the GDP forecasts of various groups just after the referendum have been doing recently, those of EFFT have been wildly optimistic compared to others. As the chart shows, EFFT (then Economists for Brexit) did well in the first few quarters after the referendum because many consumers dipped into their savings, but by the end of 2018 EFFT were doing much worse than the OBR, Bank of England and the consensus of private sector forecasters. Giles sums this up by saying “The lesson is simple: listen to economists, but not to those peddling a political line.”

So the only economists who really believe in Global Britain have already been shown to be far too optimistic about the impact of Brexit. No doubt they would say that is because May’s deal prevents Global Britain, but it is clear from movements in sterling that the foreign exchange markets fear No Deal most of all because of the impact this would have on trade. The Brexiters have a wonderful way of avoiding these facts. As the consensus among economists is that trade will suffer if we leave the EU, economists overwhelmingly favour staying in the EU. The Brexiters then conclude that if they favour Remain they therefore must be biased. Ergo only the predictions of economists who believe in Global Britain can be trusted!

There would be a certain horrible symmetry if May’s Brexit deal had passed this week. It would have been a narrow victory, just as the EU referendum result was narrow. It would be a victory tainted with public money used to bribe Labour MPs and the DUP, while the referendum vote was won by the Leave side spending much more private money than the rules allowed. Both victories would have been won against a weak and divided opposition: Cameron unable to talk about the virtues of immigration and Corbyn unable to campaign against Brexit. Both May’s deal and the referendum victory are based on lies designed only to get them across the line. Both are blind, with no clear idea of the kind of Brexit that will follow. Both therefore fail basic notions of legitimacy.

If Bercow prevents May putting her deal before parliament again in the near future, or if she decides herself she would not win anyway, then her failure to pass her deal on 12^th March involves a delicious irony. Brexit failed to happen because of the actions of Brexiters themselves, because they actually believed one of their own lies: the make-believe of Global Britain.

Large models, small models and Brexit

Non-economists with no interest in modelling techniques can skip to paragraph starting 'How is this all related to Brexit'.

I promised to look at some of the other papers in the OxREP volume “Rebuilding macroeconomic theory” besides my own, but as usual other things - including Brexit - got in the way. In this post I want to talk about the paper by Haldane and Turrell, which is about Agent Based Models, or ABMs. Right at the end of this post, however, I will come back to Brexit.

As a result of the microfoundations hegemony, any paper talking about a different modelling strategy often feels it must start by describing some drawbacks of that hegemony, and this paper is no exception. I might talk about that some other time, but instead I want to recommend what I think is one of the most realistic discussions of what ABM can or cannot do I have read.

As you might guess from the name, ABMs model the economy as a collection of a large number of different agents, each of which behaves in a specified way. The authors generalise the idea of a choice between internal and external consistency that I talk about in my paper to also include a degree of heterogeneity.

As you can see, ABMs are all about allowing as much heterogeneity as you wish. This is not to say that other methods cannot do heterogeneity (they can), but ABMs major in this dimension, and in practice often keep the behaviour of agents relatively simple compared to a DSGE. (A slight quibble: I would argue that as DSGEs are internally consistent by definition, the orange square representing them should be a slimmer and perhaps taller rectangle.) ABMs (within the bounds of tractability) owe no allegiance to any school of thought: the paper has a nice table of the many different types of consumption function used in a range of ABM studies.

As the macroeconomy is indeed made up of many different types of agents who may be doing different things, and whose interaction may produce unexpected results, it seems like ABMs can only be a good thing. But this additional freedom brings a large cost. Because, and unlike some hard sciences, there is a large amount of uncertainty about how people actually behave, we cannot treat any model as a black box, the output from which has to be accepted without question. No civil servant or central bank economist can go to politicians or governors and simply say it is what the model said.

Exactly the same problem can arise with SEMs, simply because of their complexity or disaggregation. It could also arise from a complex DSGE. The first question any economist asks when seeing an output from any large and complex model is does the result make sense given the smaller theoretical models they carry around in their head. It is why I proposed for SEMs the process I called theoretical deconstruction, where model properties were either reduced to familiar results from simpler models, or show the limitations of those simpler models. Again, as the paper notes, a similar process needs to, and in some cases has, happened with results from ABMs.

How is this all related to Brexit? The results showing how different degrees of Brexit would do the economy damage to different extents that I talked about in my last post were produced by trade theory’s equivalent of ABMs, called computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. These allow for considerable heterogeneity (across sectors and countries) in modelling trade. As Chris Giles recounts in this excellent piece, the model is more complex than anything the Treasury had before Brexit, and was built specifically to help with Brexit.

As Chris writes

“It must have come as a bit of a shock to government economists that the moment some results of this new model were leaked this week, ministers rushed to deny the usefulness of the tools they commissioned. Such models are “always wrong”, declared Steve Baker, a junior Brexit minister, on Tuesday.”

As I note in a postscript to my last post, he went further on Thursday to suggest that civil servants had deliberately cooked the model to sabotage Brexit.

How do we know that this didn’t happen, apart from the implausibility that so many civil servants could concoct such a conspiracy. Precisely because in this case the results from a highly disaggregated model broadly agrees with most other studies, and also common sense: the more difficult you make trade, the less there will be and the more costly that will be for UK output. Chris ends with some words that should be sent to every journalist in the country.

“Ministers now have a choice. They can opt for an honest Brexit in which they argue in public that people should pay an economic price for their policies. Or they can opt for a dishonest Brexit, pretending they have a secret plan for economic nirvana and trashing their own internal economic evidence. Ministers’ initial reaction in disowning the analysis suggests deception is the government’s central Brexit strategy. People talk about a crisis in economics. After this episode, it is the crisis in politics that should really concern us.”

The OBR, productivity and policy failures

Chris Giles had an article in the FT yesterday about the UK’s continuing dreadful productivity performance, and the implications this might have for forecasts of the public finances. It has the following chart comparing successive OBR forecasts and actual data.

I want to make two points about this. The first is about the OBR’s forecast. [1] It is easy to say looking at this chart that the OBR has for a long time been foolishly optimistic about UK productivity growth. Too often growth was expected to return to its long run trend shortly after the forecast was published but it failed to do so. Expect lots of articles about how hopeless macro forecasts are in general, or perhaps how hopeless OBR forecasts are in particular. It was obvious, these articles might say, that trend productivity growth in the UK has taken a permanent hit following the financial crisis.

Anyone saying this is ignoring the history of the UK economy for the 50 years before the GFC. After each downturn or recession, labour productivity growth has initially fallen, but it has within a few years recovered to return to its underlying trend of around 2.25% per annum. This means not just returning to growth of 2.25%, but initially exceeding it as productivity caught up with the ground lost in the recession. In a boom sometimes growth exceeded this trend line, but it soon fell back towards it.

This made sense. Productivity growth reflects technical progress and innovation, and they tend to continue despite recessions. A firm may not be able to implement innovations during a recession, but once the recession is over experience suggests they make up for lost ground in terms of putting innovations into practice.

Given this experience, OBR forecasts have always been pretty pessimistic. They have assumed a return to trend growth, but no catch up to make up for lost ground. If they had also forecast, in 2014 say, that given recent experience they expected productivity growth to be almost flat for the next five years that would have been regarded as extreme at the time. Why would UK firms continue to ignore productivity enhancing innovations when the macroeconomic outlook looked reasonable?

And of course in 2014 UK productivity growth was positive. This brings me to my second point, which follows from this quote from the FT article:

“In the Budget, both the OBR and Mr Hammond are likely to stress that the downgraded forecasts do not reflect a new assessment of the damage to the UK economy from Brexit, but a reassessment of likely productivity growth after so many recent disappointments.”

Chris may be right that they will say this, but is it remotely plausible? As my recent post tried to suggest, UK productivity growth can be seen as suffering from three large shocks: the recession following the GFC, the absence of a normal recovery as a result of austerity, and then Brexit. The first two of those shocks led to a period of intense uncertainty, causing UK firms to put on hold any plans to innovate. Just as they thought things had returned to a subdued version of normal they were hit by the third, Brexit. During periods of intense uncertainty, productivity stalls or may even decline a little, as firms meet any increase in demand by increasing employment but not investing in new techniques. [2]

This story involving uncertainty seems to fit the data. Once the recovery (of sorts) finally began in 2013, productivity growth picked up. That sustained growth came to a halt when the Conservatives won the 2015 election, and the possibility of Brexit began to be an important factor for firms. [3]

These two points are related in the following way. The experience of the 50 years before the GFC suggested that you could hit the economy with pretty large hammers, but it would eventually bounce back. However that may have been contingent on a belief by firms that if policymakers were wielding the hammer (using high interest rates for example) they would take it away fairly soon, and replace it by stimulus. That belief was shattered in the UK by the GFC and austerity, where policymakers decided to keep using the hammer. What little confidence remained was destroyed by Brexit.

Discoveries are still be being made in universities around the world, and we know innovations are still being implemented by leading UK firms. It seems completely far fetched to imagine the GFC is still having some mysterious impact on the remainder of UK firms such that they refuse to adopt these innovations. A much more plausible story is that we are seeing what happens when most firms lose confidence in the ability of policymakers to manage the economy.

[1] I am on the OBR’s advisory panel, but as our job when we meet once a year is to be critical of OBR assumptions, and as we have no role in producing their forecasts, I think what I say here can be completely objective.

[2] Productivity can initially fall because new employees are not as productive as those who have been working in the firms for some time, for example.
Postscript (7/10/17) For evidence on the impact of Brexit on productivity, see work by Bloom and Mizen here.

[3] An alternative story is that the UK has settled into a new slow growth ‘equilibrium’, where the majority of firms are so pessimistic they hardly innovate at all.      

Productivity and monetary policy

The Bank are warning of imminent rises in interest rates. As Chris Giles points out, we have been here before, and before that, but that shouldn’t mean we should dismiss this talk, because one day it will happen. [1] They (the MPC) certainly sound serious. But why when current growth is so slow are they even contemplating it? Here is a clue from Mark Carney’s latest speech (my italics).

“On the supply side, the process of leaving the EU is beginning to be felt. Brexit-related uncertainties are causing some companies to delay decisions about building capacity and entering new markets. Prolonged low investment will restrain growth in the capital stock and increases in productivity. Indeed, if the MPC’s current forecast comes to pass, the level of investment in 2020 is expected to be 20% below the level which the MPC had projected just before the referendum. Net migration has also fallen by 25% since the Referendum.

As a result of these factors and the general weakness in UK productivity growth since the global financial crisis, the supply capacity of the UK economy is likely to expand at only modest rates in coming years.”

When people, like me, say how can the Bank be thinking of raising rates when demand is so weak, the response from the Bank would be that supply has been at least as weak.

This pessimism about the supply side comes straight from the data. If I hear people talking about the UK being a ‘strong economy’, I know they either have not seen this chart or are just lying.

UK Output per hour, whole economy (ONS)

The red line is a trend that pretty well matches the trend in the data until the end of 2007, with the amount you can produce with an hours worth of labour increasing by 2.2% a year. Since the global financial crisis (GFC) there has been almost no growth at all. If you want to know the main reason real wages have stopped increasing, this is it. [2]

I hear some people say this is just oil and financial services. It is not, as this table from a recent Andy Haldane speech shows.

Start at the bottom: total average growth has been non-existent since the crisis. The rest of the table looks at the contribution of each sector to that total. To see what productivity growth would be excluding financial services, just add that figure to the total: 1.8% 1998-2008, 0.4% 2009-2016. That table makes it clear that the productivity crisis is economy wide.

It is worth looking at aggregate productivity since the GFC period in more detail (same data). I often hear people say the productivity slowdown started before the GFC. From the chart below, it clearly did not. (We have just seen the tenth anniversary of Northern Rock going bust, and the UK productivity slowdown started shortly after that event.)

We could describe this data as five phases. 1) Productivity in the recession fell, as it often does in a recession for various reasons. 2) As the economy begins to grow again, so did productivity growth. 3) As it becomes clear, in 2011, that the ‘recovery’ is going to be very weak because of austerity, productivity growth stops growing. 4) By the end of 2013, with stronger growth under way (although still no catch up to previous trends, so not a true recovery) productivity starts growing again, although rather slowly. 5) Since the 2015 election, with the prospect and then the reality of Brexit, even that modest growth disappears. (My data does not include 2017Q2, which saw a very slight fall.) I could shorten the description as follows: recession, modest optimism, pessimism, even more modest optimism, uncertainty.

That is my gloss on the numbers, but I’ve done it to make a point. Productivity growth invariably requires an investment of some kind. It may not be physical investment, but just training someone up to be able to use some new software. Whether a firm incurs that cost will depend, in part, on their expectations about the future. There is a regrettable tendency in macro (I blame RBC theory) to treat productivity growth as manna from heaven. But the idea that potential improvements in technology stopped after the GFC, and just in the UK, is simply ridiculous. The problem is that firms are not investing in new technology. What I call the ‘innovations gap’ has emerged in the UK because of weak growth and the consequent pessimistic expectations of most firms. [3]

The idea that the economy could get itself in a low growth expectations trap is increasingly being put forward by economists: here is George Evans, for example. The UK has got itself into that trap because on the two occasions that a recovery of sorts appeared to be under way, the economy has been hit with terrible policy errors (austerity and Brexit). But the idea that UK firms are incapable of upgrading their production techniques is nonsense. They will do so initially if they can be confident that the demand for their products will increase, or subsequently when the innovation pays for itself even though demand is flat.

Which is why an increase in interest rates right now would be very bad news. It would confirm the pessimistic expectations of most firms that demand is not going to grow fast enough to make innovation worthwhile. Formally, the job of the MPC is not to worry about productivity but to control inflation. But elsewhere, where the same process may be happening to a lesser extent (the productivity slowdown is worldwide, just most acute in the UK), central banks are puzzled at why inflation just refuses to rise. 

The concept of an innovations gap is one solution to that puzzle. Expanding demand allows firms to invest in more productive techniques, and so there is less incentive to choke of demand by raising prices. I suspect in an alternative world where Brexit had not happened the Bank of England would also be puzzling over why prices were not rising. As a result, if the MPC do finally raise interest rates this year, it would be one more mistake to add to the growing list under the heading Brexit.

[1] On each occasion I also wrote a post saying that they should not raise rates, starting I think at the beginning of 2014.

[2] I discussed in earlier posts why real wages are falling by even more than output per head.

[3] Or perhaps the pessimism of the bank manager lending money to those firms. The Haldane speech shows that productivity growth has remained strong among the top, frontier companies. Why? Because these companies, given their position, will be seeing growth relative to the average, and have got to the frontier through a culture of innovation.

In defence of George Osborne over Brexit

This by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator (HT Tim Harford) starts well: “Sometimes, George Osborne’s dishonesty is simply breathtaking.” Who could disagree with that? Except that the statement Nelson objects to is the following:

“Britain would be permanently poorer if we left the European Union, to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the county. That’s a fact everyone should think about as they consider how to vote.”

Nelson does not object to the economics behind the number, set out clearly in a Treasury study released yesterday. (For an excellent review of the study, which makes both of the points I make below, see Chris Giles here.) Instead he has two objections:

1. With economic growth we would not be poorer under Brexit, just less richer than we would have been if we had remained in the EU
   
   
2. The household figure is derived by dividing the GDP ‘loss’ by the number of households in the UK.
   
   

Nelson makes the point that household after tax income is only about two thirds of GDP/households. So implicitly he is saying is that we shouldn’t count lower taxes (and therefore government spending) and investment (future incomes) when assessing whether people would be poorer. But that seems silly. We all benefit from total government spending and investment, so we would feel less well off if we lost some of that. [1]

Indeed I have done exactly as the Chancellor has done when assessing the impact of 2010 austerity. I calculated, using OBR figures, that austerity cost each UK household at least £4000. The two figures appear comparable, but in fact they are not. My figure is a total one-off cost, on the (admitted very optimistic) assumption that the UK economy had completely recovered from 2010 austerity by 2013. The Brexit cost is a continuing loss each year.

Alas for Fraser Nelson dividing any GDP loss by the number of households is standard practice among economists (see John Van Reenen here for example), and we do it to make our analysis more relevant to those who do not commonly think in terms of GDP. It is also common practice to think about counterfactuals: if we did X (Leave) rather than Y (Remain) how much better/worse off would we be. It is just much clearer to do things that way. Who knows how much richer we will be by 2030: that would be a pretty unreliable forecast, because it depends on pretty well everything. In contrast we can be much surer (although still uncertain) about what the impact of just one change (leaving the EU) will have.

Now if you wanted to avoid any ambiguity, you could rewrite the first sentence of the Chancellor’s statement as follows:

““Britain would be worse off if we left the European Union compared to if we stayed in, to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the county by 2030, and for each and every year after that.”

If this is honest, does that make the original version dishonest. I do not think so.

If this report illustrates anything, it is that it would have been much more effective to have launched a 2003 joining the Euro type exercise immediately after the 2015 election victory, consulting widely among outside experts, and perhaps getting some of them to write key parts of the report. That would have produced a wider range of numbers for the cost, and the Chancellor could have then chosen the higher one, simply inserting ‘up to’ in front of it. But here I am, defending George Osborne and advising him on spin. I think I better go and lie down for a while.

[1] Slightly pedantic economic point: we should really use GNP rather than GDP, but it makes little difference here.  

Politically impossible

An article in the Financial Times recently said of me: “He has opposed deficit reduction when the economy was weak and when it was strong.” Ah yes, this would be the same economist who has suggested the left aims to reduce the current deficit (all current spending less revenue) to zero, that pre-crisis fiscal policy in the Euro periphery should have been much more contractionary, and has championed fiscal councils as a way of eliminating deficit bias.

Should I have demanded a retraction? I didn’t: life is short, maybe it was a kind of joke, or even a misprint, and if not perhaps it said more about the writer than it did about me.

But I was reminded of it last week when I was discussing pre-crisis fiscal policy. As I noted in one of those earlier posts, I am repeatedly told that pre-crisis fiscal policy in Spain could not have been tighter. It was ‘politically impossible’, given the budget surpluses at the time. I heard a similar point made about Ireland last week. (While a big part of Ireland’s post-crisis fiscal problems were down to socialising its financial sector’s debts, a significant part was also due to relying too much before the crisis from receipts based on an unsustainable housing boom, as was the case in Spain.)

It occurred to me (and yes, I know it is obvious) that such complaints are just the mirror image of those who say we have to have austerity because running up higher government deficits is just ‘politically impossible’. The argument that governments cannot run very large surpluses because voters would demand that they be spent relies on the same logic which says that governments need to tighten their belts when the private sector is doing the same. In other words you cannot complain about austerity on the one hand and then say that it was politically impossible to run larger surpluses in a boom.

Equally it makes no sense obsessing about the need to reduce deficits in a recession and then turning a blind eye when surpluses are spent in a boom. Unfortunately just that kind of inconsistent thinking became hard-wired in the form of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), with its focus on a limit of 3% for deficits. Those who say that all that was wrong with the SGP is that it was not enforced have learnt nothing. This is why we need to move influence away from the Commission and towards independent national fiscal councils.               

Mediamacro myth makers fight back

This may also be the first in a series!

In a recent blog, David Smith of the Times writes

“One of the most enduring claims about the British economy in recent years is that the then coalition government abandoned austerity in 2012. It is a claim that gives comfort to those who see everything that has happened to the economy through the lens of fiscal policy. Only when austerity was abandoned in 2012, some argue, did the economy begin to recover. Unfortunately it does not fit the facts. It is a myth.”

Chris Giles of the FT tweeted: “The shocking thing about this excellent post is the misinformation that forced @dsmitheconomics to write it”.

Now the reference to myths might make you think David Smith is having a go at yours truly, but I would never be so narcissistic. I know this cannot be the case because I have never said that austerity was abandoned in 2012. In fact I cannot think of anyone who did, but clearly I’m not reading the right people. Of course this could be another example of the straw man trick: to defend position X (plan A continued) against position Y (the pace of austerity slowed), create a third position Z (austerity abandoned) which is a silly exaggeration of Y, and show that Z is false. Ergo X must be true. Remember how critics of austerity had to be wrong because they claimed a recovery would never happen.

What David concludes, of course, is that the pace of austerity slowed from 2012 onwards, which is obvious if you just look at the data. So why does he think this is such a problem for critics of austerity? Again we need a straw man: someone who “see[s] everything that has happened to the economy through the lens of fiscal policy.” Now I’m sure I have never met anyone like that, but if such a person existed then the 2013 recovery would be inexplicable, because austerity was continuing (albeit more slowly).

This is terrible stuff. Every macroeconomist besides those of David Smith’s imagination knows that the economy is influenced by all kinds of factors, or which fiscal policy is but one. So a recovery is perfectly compatible with austerity being a drag on growth, particularly if monetary policy is highly expansionary.

One way of thinking about the impact of a fiscal contraction is that it has its maximum impact on the level of GDP when it happens, but this impact dies away as other forces, like monetary policy, bring GDP back to its ‘natural’ level. Whether that is the right way to model the impact of fiscal policy in a liquidity trap is debatable, but that is how the OBR treats the impact of fiscal policy, and from his post I’m glad to see that David thinks the OBR is an authority on these matters.  

Here is a chart from this OBR document.

The orange bars show the impact the original 2010 plan would have had, and the blue bars what actually happened (and what will happen) as seen in March 2014. The blue bars are the basis for my conservative estimate that austerity cost every UK household on average £4000 worth of resources. Even though in both cases austerity continues through 2012 and 2013, the impact on growth dies away (or even becomes positive), because the negative effect of any new austerity is offset by the impact of earlier austerity dying away.

Harmful austerity does not need to be abandoned before a recovery can happen. Slowing down austerity clearly makes a recovery easier, but that is not the main reason why the mediamacro myth that ‘Plan A’ continued is important. As I wrote here: “Not making it clear that the plan had changed was a serious failure. If that call had been made, the Chancellor would have had to account for why he had allowed deficit reduction to stall, and that in turn would have established quite clearly that previous austerity had delayed the recovery.”

It really is very simple. George Osborne campaigned in 2010 that Labour’s plan to cut the deficit by half in five years was much too slow, and so began a much tougher austerity programme. More rapid deficit reduction was at the centre of that plan. But deficit reduction was allowed to slow from 2012. Why did the media not challenge Osborne on why this was happening? Why did it go along with the fiction that the plan was unchanged? The media has no problem asking Labour politicians to account for why they borrowed too much (allegedly), but when George Osborne borrows much more than he planned, having previously stressed the importance of cutting the deficit quickly, this suddenly becomes unimportant. Strange that.  

Greece: of parents and children, economists and politicians

Not part of the mediamacro myths series, but in a way related.

Chris Giles has a recent FT article where he describes how non-Greek policymakers (lets still call them the Troika) see themselves like parents trying to deal with the “antics” of the problem child, Syriza in Greece. He splits these parents into different types: those that want to act as if the child is grown up (though they believe they are not), those who want to be disciplinarians etc. As a description of how the Troika view themselves, and present themselves to the public, the analogy rings true. It certainly accords with the constant stream of articles in the press predicting an impending crisis because the Greeks ‘refuse to be reasonable’.

In FT Alphaville Peter Doyle writes about a recent meeting at the Brookings Institution in Washington, the highly respected US social science research/policy think tank. In that meeting Wolfgang Schäuble and Yanis Varoufakis, finance ministers of Germany and Greece, gave back-to-back presentations. He describes how “Schäuble was avuncular, self-effacing, and Germanic, and was tolerated rather than warmly embraced by his hosts.” In contrast “when Varoufakis spoke, eyes burning with anger, his hosts were animatedly engaged.” The audience actively sympathised with the position of Greece, and asked “how it felt to be right but penniless”. He writes “There was no doubt where the hosts’ sympathies lay between their two guests.”

I am not surprised at all by this account. The arguments that many of us have made about how far Greece has moved and what agonies it has endured in order to satisfy the unrealistic wishes of their creditors are I think widely shared among our colleagues. We know that if Greece was not part of the Euro, but just another of a long line of countries that have borrowed too much and had to partially default, its remaining creditors would be in a weak position now that Greece has achieved primary surpluses (taxes>government spending). The reason why the Troika is not so weak is that they have additional threats that come from being the issuer of the Greek currency.

It is important to understand what the current negotiations are about. Running a primary surplus means that Greece no longer needs additional borrowing - it just needs to be able to roll over its existing debts. Part of the argument is about how large a primary surplus Greece should run. Common sense would say that further austerity should be avoided so that the economy can fully recover, when it will have much greater resources to be able to pay back loans. Instead the creditors want more austerity to achieve large primary surpluses. Of course the former course of action is better for Greece: which would be better for the creditors is unclear! The negotiations are also about imposing additional structural reforms. Greece has already undertaken many, and is prepared to go further, but the Troika wants yet more.

As Andrew Watt points out, from the perspective of the Eurozone and IMF, this is all extremely small beer. [1] You would think the key players on that side had more important things to do with their time. The material advantages to be gained by the Troika playing tough are minimal from their perspective, but the threats hanging over the Greek economy are damaging - not just to investment, but also to the very primary surpluses that the Troika needs. So why do the Troika insist on continuing with brinkmanship? Can it be that this is really about ensuring that an elected government that challenges the dominant Eurozone political and economic ideology must be forced to fail?

In a recent post that I (jokingly) entitled ‘Should economists rule?’ I suggested that much of the debate about the delegation of economic policy to economic experts was really an issue about political transparency rather than diminished democracy. Elected politicians normally always have ultimate control. Sometimes ‘delegation’ amounts to little more than making the advice they receive transparent: contracting out the fiscal forecast to the OBR would be an example. [2] All that democracy loses in this case is the ability of politicians to conceal or manipulate the advice they receive, and to fool the public as a result. Greece may be (unfortunately) a good example of how far politicians are prepared to go in misleading their own electorates to cover-up their mistakes and achieve their own political ends.

  

[1] The IMF mainly consists of hundreds of economists, but it is run by politicians, and on issues like this the politicians tend to take control.

[2] With central bank independence they do lose control, but normally with the power to take back control in some way. Furthermore, if the undemocratic central bank persistently made bad decisions, taking back control would be popular. An exception is the ECB, which may help explain why many of its words and actions are seriously problematic.

Rollercoasters and rules

Chris Giles says today that “there is a gap [between Labour and Conservatives plans] of more than £30bn a year in public spending by the end of the decade, at least 1.4 per cent of national income. This is a bigger political divide seen in any election since the days of Margaret Thatcher.” Chris is absolutely right to focus on this fact, and it is really important that other journalists (including those on the political side) do the same. The reason is that neither Labour nor the Conservatives want to admit this. Labour wants to appear as if they are being ‘tough on the deficit’ and the Conservatives want to turn this into a ‘Labour would put up taxes’ election. With all the noise that these phoney debates throw up, it is important that someone tells people what the consequences of their vote will be.

Chris may also be right that the rollercoaster for public spending set out in the Budget (sharp cuts followed by increases) will not happen. However I think it would be wrong to expect a smooth ride under the Conservatives either. They will have won an election based on an initial two years of substantial spending cuts (particularly to public investment), followed by later years when the overall pace of fiscal consolidation slowed substantially (in part because of Budget tax cuts). If that wins them this election, they will want to repeat that pattern. [1]

The term rollercoaster was coined by Robert Chote, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility. But if the rollercoaster will never happen, was Robert wrong to use this word? Absolutely not - in using that term he was doing his job in a very effective way.

As Chris explains, the reason why the numbers given to the OBR generate a rollercoaster profile is the revised fiscal rule, which says that there should be (cyclically adjusted) balance within three years. Like the old rule, this is a rolling target (but now for three years ahead rather than five), so it means in effect that governments can keep putting off the date balance is achieved as each year rolls past.

If governments start planning their fiscal actions with this in mind, the rule becomes largely worthless: it means reducing deficits mañana. As I explained here, rolling targets are a good idea because they allow policy to be flexible in the face of shocks. But rolling targets can also be abused by an irresponsible government to forever put off deficit reduction.

As I argued here, there was no good reason for Osborne to switch from a five to three year rolling target, and good reasons to stick to five years. The move to three years looked like a political ploy to embarrass the opposition. When politicians start messing around with fiscal rules for political ends, and these rules then produce silly results which politicians have no intention of sticking to, it is important that an independent institution with the words ‘budget responsibility’ in their title calls attention to what is going on. Robert Chote did that very effectively by using the term rollercoaster. 

[1] Where I think Chris is wrong is in describing plans to decrease debt slowly as risky. The opposite is the case. With interest rates near their floor, sharp austerity puts the economy at risk from adverse macroeconomic shocks. 

Mediamacro and responsibility

The Chancellor gives a huge pre-election bribe to the moderately wealthy over 65s, and describes the fact that everyone who can is trying to get hold of the bribe (and completely overwhelming the NS&I as a result) as a great success. [1] Chris Dillow describes this as corruption. To their credit, right wing think tanks have also condemned it for what it is. But the Chancellor says this is all part of his economic plan.

I suspect the penny is beginning to drop in mediamacro. This was supposed to be a government where deficit reduction was the overriding priority. It was of such importance that it was worth the risk (which materialised) of delaying the recovery until 2013 to achieve. Hard, sometimes painful choices had to be made to achieve the goal of reducing the deficit. A Chancellor who was prepared to do unpopular things for the greater good. The essence of responsibility.

Unless you were a top rate tax payer, of course. Or, following the Prime Minister’s conference speech last year, a moderately well off taxpayer. And now if you are moderately well off and over 65. Penny dropped? But this last example also tells mediamacro a difficult truth. Its modus operandi is that it can rely on the opposition to expose such things, but Labour appears to have been silent on this. Obviously, because these kind of bribes work because those that receive it are thankful and the much larger number who pay for it are not so fussed. [2] So it needs to seek out those who will call a spade a spade. It has a responsibility to do so. This time it could use right wing think tanks. Next time it may have to resort to economists who write blogs.

Chris Giles, economics editor of the FT, wrote an interesting opinion piece a few days ago. It appears at first sight to be an attack on Labour’s record in opposition. But it ends with “the intriguing thing about Mr Miliband’s Labour party is that its broad economic prospectus for the 2015 general election is perfectly sensible.” In contrast “the Tories’ plans appear ideological and border on calamitous for many public services.” If you want more detail on this, see my debate with Oliver Kamm in Prospect magazine. So his article is a form of puzzle: how did responsible Tories and reckless Labour change places?

One possibility, of course, is that there never was a puzzle. Chris lists many alleged failings by Labour, but a lot look superficial and presentational to me. Furthermore (and I know Chris will not want to admit this) when Ed Balls said Osborne was cutting too far too fast, he was right. In particular, public investment (school repairs, flood prevention) was cut immediately when there was no need to do so to meet the coalition's fiscal rules. Those who think it had to be done to appease the market should reflect on the fact that Britain lost its AAA rating because of weak growth, and pretty well everyone thinks that public investment has the largest GDP multiplier.

It is the media’s responsibility, which Chris for his part has grudgingly fulfilled, to point out - one way or another - who has the more responsible macroeconomic plan post 2015. The opposition will not make that case, because it has become terrified of being labelled spendthrift. Yet it is hard to find a macroeconomist who does not think Labour has the better macro policy from 2015, whatever their views about 2010 austerity. A responsible media needs to get this point across, just as it needs to point out pre-election bribes.

[1] Once upon a time NS&I was just a way that the government could sell its debt to ordinary people at slightly below market rates because it was safer than banks. However after the financial crisis, when it became clear how risky banks were, the government seems to have contracted the range of products that NS&I sell, I guess because of lobbying by these same banks. Once you could buy indexed linked assets from NS&I - no longer. Now it has become a vehicle for giving bribes to selected groups of savers.

[2] This is the ‘common pool problem’, one of the reasons economists give to explain deficit bias, which is of course being irresponsible about the deficit.