The answer is
probably not: a simple balance budget is worse. The German
Schuldenbremse fixes
the total cyclically adjusted deficit at 0.35% of GDP, which implies
a gradually falling debt to GDP ratio. If actual outturns exceed this
figure, there is a control mechanism which reduces the permitted
deficit to get the path of debt back on target. So this debt brake
improves on a simple balance budget by allowing a very modest deficit
and cyclically adjusting. On the other hand it is worse than a simple
balanced budget because it error corrects.
The fundamental
mistake the rule makes is to make control of debt its central aim.
Doing this only makes sense if you ignore macroeconomic common sense.
The deficit and debt are macroeconomic shock absorbers. Running a
variable deficit allows taxes and spending to be reasonably stable,
which is beneficial for obvious and not so obvious reasons. Trying to
tightly control the deficit and debt does the opposite. It makes
sense to smooth taxes and government spending, but no sense
whatsoever to smooth the deficit and debt.
The aim of a good
fiscal rule is to eliminate deficit bias, which is the tendency of
government debt to rise over time because, for example, politicians
always want to spend more and tax less. The timescale for deficit
bias is decades rather than years, so there is no need in principle
to tightly constrain year to year deficits, or worse still to try and
stay on some path for debt, and as I have already noted it is
actually harmful from a macroeconomic point of view to do so.
Doesn’t the debt
brake make some concession towards the macroeconomic stabilising role
of the deficit by cyclical correction? There are two problems here.
First, cyclical correction is a very imprecise art, and there is
evidence
the method used in the German debt brake and elsewhere does not work
very well. Second, cyclical shocks are not the only thing that
disturbs the government’s deficit. In practice all kinds of things
can lead to erratic movements in the deficit, and it makes no sense
to have to adjust tax rates or spending to exactly offset this
erratic behaviour.
As Jonathan Portes
and I explain in our paper
on fiscal rules, a better way of keeping the stabilising role of
deficits while still ensuring they do not steadily increase over time
is to have a rolling target for the future deficit. Five years
is the typical length of an economic cycle, so looking ahead five
years makes sense, and also avoids the need for imperfect cyclical
adjustment.
This kind of rolling
future target is open to cheating, because the government can always
promise but never intend to deliver on meeting the target. The
problem here is that governments can cheat in so many ways when it
comes to fiscal planning. No rule, even a draconian one like the debt
brake, will stop all forms of cheating. The best way to avoid
cheating is to establish a fiscal council with political weight that
can distinguish between a government that fails to meet its targets
through bad luck and one that fails because of cheating.
Do we need the debt
error correction in the debt brake? A consistent result in academic
research is that debt correction should be very slow, if it happens at all. That happens
automatically with a deficit target, while the debt brake corrects
too quickly. So the answer is no.
Another problem
with the debt brake, alongside many other fiscal rules, is that it
has a target for the overall deficit which includes public
investment. Public investment should not be included in any deficit
target, because there is no reason the current generation should pay
for something that will benefit future generations. As investment is
less painful to cut than current spending (or raising taxes), rules
for the total deficit often lead to under investment, and we can see
this in Germany. That only hurts future generations.
This is not about
Anglo-Saxon economists telling Germany what to do. There are plenty
of German economists who also see that the German debt brake makes no
sense, and anyway economics is universal. The debt brake is a bad
fiscal rule. It is doing the German people harm. It needs to change.
