Fiscal rules should target the deficit, not spending

This jointly authored VoxEU piece on making the EU more resilient after Brexit that came out nearly two months ago has already had some unfavourable comment: Paul Krugman calls it timid, and Brad Delong does not like it much either. I want to pick out one particular idea, which I think is simply wrong and dangerous, and which I find it extraordinary that so many economists signed up to. Here is the relevant passage, in a section about the public finances.

“In most countries, the level of [government] expenditure – rather than the deficit – is the main problem. High expenditure makes it difficult to raise taxes and balance the budget, leading to dangerous debt dynamics. Thus, a focus on expenditure rules, linking expenditure reduction to debt levels, appears to be one of the most promising routes.”

Now this sounds to me like saying two things. The first is that the size of the state is too large in most countries. [1] The second is that we can use the need to bring government debt down as a way to correct that. It sounds to me exactly the policy that I accuse US and UK governments of following, although in their case the linkage is generally concealed. In this article it is suggested it should be explicit.

Whatever your views about the size of the state (including having no a priori view), it seems obvious that this is an intensely political issue. In contrast questions about the appropriate long run size of government debt are not so political, but more importantly they involve a completely different set of issues to those involved with the size of the state.

That is why policies or fiscal rules that aim to stabilise or bring down government debt focus on the budget deficit. It keeps the issue separate from the appropriate size of the state, and hopefully takes a good deal of the politics out of that issue. Linking the two issues makes it very easy to fall into what I call deficit deceit: saying we must cut government spending because government debt is too high, rather than because the state is too large. Even if that is avoided, associating the two sets back the cause of sensible debt management by needlessly politicising it.

That is why sensible fiscal rules target the deficit in some form, and allow how that deficit is achieved to be a political choice. I know this may seem obvious to me because I have written a lot about fiscal rules, but I would have thought the point might have also occurred to one of the economist authors of that article. When heterodox economists argue that the mainstream is hopelessly embroiled in the neoliberal project, they will be able to cite this article as evidence.

[1] You might say that, perhaps with certain European countries in mind, this is just a recognition that there is too much inefficiency and needless bureaucracy within government, rather than being a deeper statement of what governments should and should not do. If that is the case the authors should say so, but even then the coupling with debt control is problematic.

Greece: a simple macroeconomic guide

In reading this, which I will come back to, I thought something short and simple was required

In 2010 periphery Eurozone countries, including Greece, faced two problems: government deficits were too high, and as a result their economies had become uncompetitive. (Excessive deficits - public or subsequently socialised private - had allowed the economy to run too hot which pushed up inflation leading to a loss of competitiveness.)

The deficits needed to be reduced. Under flexible exchange rates this could have been done with relatively little cost in terms of unemployment because competitiveness could have adjusted to its appropriate level immediately via a nominal depreciation. The demand lost from lower public spending could be compensated for by more competitive exports. In a monetary union, this cannot happen, so a period of unemployment is inevitable to restore competitiveness.

The key macroeconomic question is how quick adjustment should be. Should competitiveness be restored quickly or slowly. Macroeconomics has a pretty clear answer which comes from the Phillips curve (of whatever variety) - slow is much more efficient. So it makes sense for some institution like the IMF to provide loans to the government to allow it to eliminate deficits gradually. There are lots of political and social reasons to make adjustment gradual as well, but this is just about the macro.

Those are general principles. When it came to Greece, the Eurozone made three key mistakes.

1)    Too much austerity too quickly, violating the logic of the previous paragraph. Sharp austerity can almost appear self-defeating in deficit reduction terms, as it plunges the economy into severe depression, making adjustment of any kind more difficult. The Troika has to take direct responsibility for this mistake.

2)    There was only partial (and delayed) default on Greek government debt (see below). This was clearly not in Greece’s interest, but it had benefits to other Eurozone countries.

3)    Adjustment was required in an environment of Eurozone recession and deflation, caused by needless fiscal austerity in the non-periphery countries. Restoring competitiveness is much more difficult if the countries you are adjusting with respect to have very low/zero inflation (because people resist nominal wage cuts).

That is the past, but it has direct implications for today. (2) means that the Troika were demanding Greece ran large primary surpluses in the coming years to pay back the remaining debt and adjustment loans. This makes correcting the error in (1) much more difficult, because it implies yet more austerity. In terms of macroeconomics it is a clear mistake. (If Greece could eliminate its negative output gap, it would be running a primary surplus of over 7% according to the OECD, which would be enough for everyone.)    

Now back to this Vox piece. It displays so much that is wrong with macro arguments coming out of the Eurozone at the moment. Examples:

a.    “For an economy in the dismal Greek situation, it essentially made no difference that it remained a member of the Eurozone ..” This ignores the basic macro in the second paragraph above. This denial of the importance of wage and price rigidities, which leads to the key cost of being part of a monetary union, has typified the Eurozone project from the start.

b.    “Since in all these cases painful adjustment was inevitable and costly, one should take the combination of the rescue packages and adjustment programmes as what they really are – a device helping to avoid a sudden fiscal and current account adjustment with even larger immediate pain.” It is of course true that with access to markets cut off, adjustment without any support from the IMF or elsewhere would in macro terms have been much more immediate and painful. But the implication is that the speed of adjustment matters, and in particular that it can still be too fast. The article makes no attempt to address this central issue. The message that comes across to Greece is that you should be lucky you got something.

c.    “During the past five years Greece indeed underwent serious reforms and fiscal consolidation. Progress has been remarkable …” What is remarkable is the extent of the collapse in the Greek economy. Some kind of recession was inevitable, but not a complete collapse in GDP, where over half of young people are unemployed. The article tries to suggest that this is just par for the course, rather than a function of the amount of austerity imposed.

d.    “A debt relief of public creditors could not substantially improve the comfortable state of the Greek government, let alone be justified easily vis-à-vis its lenders.” This is disingenuous. It is true that the effective interest rate on Greek debt is relatively low compared to other Eurozone countries, but nevertheless the lenders are demanding Greece run significant primary surpluses now, and they need not make this demand. 

I could go on and on, but this is meant to be short. To sum up, the problems displayed by this article amount to a neglect of the importance of wage and price rigidities, and the impact that fiscal austerity can have on demand leading to a needless waste of resources. In other words, a denial of basic Keynesian ideas.  

Saying the obvious

Give any student who has just done a year of economics some national accounts data for the US, UK and Eurozone, and ask them why the recovery from the Great Recession has been so slow, and they will almost certainly tell you it is because of fiscal austerity. And they would be right, as I set out in this recent VoxEU piece. There I present some back of the envelope calculations, but they are confirmed by model simulations: not just those I quoted in the text, but also others that I did not have space to mention.

When writing that piece, I kept having doubts. Not about the analysis, but just that this was all so obvious. It uses basic models (DSGE or more eclectic) that we teach undergraduates and postgraduates. It is supported by the clear majority of empirical evidence. I felt like I was telling people the macroeconomic equivalent of a rise in the demand for apples will mean an increase in their price.

The reason I put those doubts aside are also familiar. The fact that at least half the world’s politicians and mediamacro continue to ignore the obvious. The fact that too many economists continue to look for other reasons to explain this malaise (or pretend there is no malaise), because somehow they think acknowledging that fiscal policy can influence demand is old fashioned, or left wing, or something. These facts and that I was in good company.

While there are too many academic economists who want to deny that fiscal policy is largely responsible for the weak recovery from the Great Recession, I also suspect there is a majority that know it is true. This is why I wrote a post about the lessons to draw for the future. Although we teach students all about time inconsistency and say at the same time what advantages independent central banks can have, I suspect we also know that the case for independent central banks is broader than issues to do with commitment.

Economics is always in danger of being corrupted by politics and ideology, and macroeconomics seems particularly vulnerable in this respect. (I have still not entirely convinced myself if and why macroeconomics is special in this respect. Sometimes things that are actually micro, like financial regulation or labour supply responses to tax changes, seem just to get labelled macro when they become controversial or have macro consequences!) Some say that this corruption is inevitable and that we should embrace it, rather than attempt to avoid it through delegation to institutions like independent central banks. I disagree: demand management is basically a technical issue with political implications. If we did not have independent central banks today, I suspect we would be seeing the US congress voting to raise interest rates. And of course there would be a few economists with their models saying it was a good idea, even though the vast majority thought otherwise.

The reaction to my earlier post, both from comments and elsewhere, was that this weak recovery caused by fiscal austerity was not just bad luck caused by a misreading of the Eurozone crisis, but the result of a more fundamental political economy problem. We therefore need to rethink how stabilisation policy is done at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB). Of course we also need to think about whether we should try and minimise these ZLB episodes, by either raising the inflation target, or by reformulating how monetary policy is done, or some other means. However the risk of large negative demand shocks will remain, so it would be prudent to complete the delegation of macroeconomic stabilisation policy that was begun by making the operation of interest rate policy independent of political control. Doing that would also be a good opportunity to revisit the arrangements that can ensure independence is compatible with accountability and some degree of democratic oversight.