Finally the secret is out: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a major mistake in its calculations and discovered - surprise, surprise - that austerity measures hurt an economy in recession! The news have reverberated in the press in Europe - I'm still waiting for the New York Times to catch up (unless it's hidden in some back page, please let me know - but it certainly hasn't been a featured article).
Why is the New York Times mum about this? Probably because it's hard to budge deep-seated convictions that budget rectitude is good - indeed, the word "rectitude" tells it all. Journalists and politicians keep mistaking balancing the government budget with balancing the family budget. What's good and right for a family isn't good and right for a country. I've posted about this many times before and won't go into it now. Suffice to say that balancing a state budget is something you should do over a business cycle (i.e. several years) and not over a single year or two. And you should use the government's budget as a countervailing weight: when the economy is in recession, the state should lighten taxes and spend money to keep the economy going since recession is a result of businesses withdrawing from the market place. When boom times return is when the state should withdraw its presence from the market and seek to balance its budget. Not before, not during the recession.
No doubt the US is about to find out the hard way as "sequestration" hits the economy...
But let me get back to what the IMF just revealed: its Chief Economist, Olivier Blanchard just confessed that since the beginning of the crisis they had mistakenly calculated the fiscal multiplier at a level that was too low and hence vastly underestimated the impact of austerity on European economies. The IMF had assumed a multiplier of 0.5 when in fact all countries except Germany had a much higher multiplier, as you can see here:
Germany: 0,08
France: 0,82
UK: 0,87
Italy: 2,10
Spain: 2,60
This looks like a technicality but it isn't. It means that taxes and/or a cut in government expenditures will have a ginormous effect on economies like Italy's or Spain's as compared to Germany that will hardly feel anything (0,08 is peanuts!).
Like this compared to France and the UK:
And like this compared to Italy and Spain (illustrations from Panorama where the article was published on 27 February 2013):
Yes, Spain is grounded! Germany can withstand fiscal rectitude with its booming export economy but Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal cannot. Raising taxes is a sure recipe to send an economy in the doldrums - as the latest data on unemployment in Europe amply prove.
The only exception? Ireland which is usually pointed to as the "good pupil" in the class, the proof that austerity works. Unfortunately, in the case of Ireland, there is something else at work: it is actually saved by having turned itself into a sort of fiscal paradise within the European Union. Unlike other EU members, it doesn't charge corporations the high tax you find elsewhere in the Union. Result? All the big American corporations are headquartered there and operate in Europe from Ireland. Neat, isn't it?
For those of you who are economists and interested in the latest research on fiscal policy and the fiscal multiplier, there is an interesting paper published by the Brookings Institution last year, click here. The authors are both prestigious NBER economists: Harvard's Lawrence Summers and Berkeley's Bradford DeLong. The paper examines the efficacy of fiscal policy in severely depressed economies under the special circumstances when interest rates are constrained (as they are now) by the zero nominal lower bound. A must read for economists and an eye-opener for those brave enough to plod through!
More about it in Paul Krugman's excellent article, see below:
Why is the New York Times mum about this? Probably because it's hard to budge deep-seated convictions that budget rectitude is good - indeed, the word "rectitude" tells it all. Journalists and politicians keep mistaking balancing the government budget with balancing the family budget. What's good and right for a family isn't good and right for a country. I've posted about this many times before and won't go into it now. Suffice to say that balancing a state budget is something you should do over a business cycle (i.e. several years) and not over a single year or two. And you should use the government's budget as a countervailing weight: when the economy is in recession, the state should lighten taxes and spend money to keep the economy going since recession is a result of businesses withdrawing from the market place. When boom times return is when the state should withdraw its presence from the market and seek to balance its budget. Not before, not during the recession.
No doubt the US is about to find out the hard way as "sequestration" hits the economy...
But let me get back to what the IMF just revealed: its Chief Economist, Olivier Blanchard just confessed that since the beginning of the crisis they had mistakenly calculated the fiscal multiplier at a level that was too low and hence vastly underestimated the impact of austerity on European economies. The IMF had assumed a multiplier of 0.5 when in fact all countries except Germany had a much higher multiplier, as you can see here:
Germany: 0,08
France: 0,82
UK: 0,87
Italy: 2,10
Spain: 2,60
This looks like a technicality but it isn't. It means that taxes and/or a cut in government expenditures will have a ginormous effect on economies like Italy's or Spain's as compared to Germany that will hardly feel anything (0,08 is peanuts!).
Like this compared to France and the UK:
And like this compared to Italy and Spain (illustrations from Panorama where the article was published on 27 February 2013):
Yes, Spain is grounded! Germany can withstand fiscal rectitude with its booming export economy but Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal cannot. Raising taxes is a sure recipe to send an economy in the doldrums - as the latest data on unemployment in Europe amply prove.
The only exception? Ireland which is usually pointed to as the "good pupil" in the class, the proof that austerity works. Unfortunately, in the case of Ireland, there is something else at work: it is actually saved by having turned itself into a sort of fiscal paradise within the European Union. Unlike other EU members, it doesn't charge corporations the high tax you find elsewhere in the Union. Result? All the big American corporations are headquartered there and operate in Europe from Ireland. Neat, isn't it?
For those of you who are economists and interested in the latest research on fiscal policy and the fiscal multiplier, there is an interesting paper published by the Brookings Institution last year, click here. The authors are both prestigious NBER economists: Harvard's Lawrence Summers and Berkeley's Bradford DeLong. The paper examines the efficacy of fiscal policy in severely depressed economies under the special circumstances when interest rates are constrained (as they are now) by the zero nominal lower bound. A must read for economists and an eye-opener for those brave enough to plod through!
More about it in Paul Krugman's excellent article, see below:
Paul Krugman: Austerity Europe(mgptpt.wordpress.com)
IMF tells George Osborne austerity plan is failing(guardian.co.uk)
EU Opens Way for Easier Budgets After Italian Austerity Backlash - Bloomberg(bloomberg.com)
Europe's Crisis Gaining Momentum(libertybullhorn.com)
Comments
Sequestration is doomed to hurt the American economy because there is no wisdom whatsoever employed in making the cuts. Just cut.
Unwise spending also hurts. Take for example, Obama's support of "green industries". No, I'm not going to decry "green industry", just the ones he chose to dump billions into. They all went bankrupt and Obama insiders escaped punishment. Indeed, they funneled a healthy share of those billions into their own pockets. (It's what we call "crony capitalism".) Meanwhile, entrepreneurs and other capitalists set about quietly searching for real solutions. Cheap natural gas to power electrical generators. (The price of natural gas is falling precipitously in the U.S.) A new super capacitor technology (graphene batteries) that will make electric cars, maybe electric airplanes, a reality.
The real problem is that the very people who revile capitalism are destroying the good that only capitalism has done. For example, since 1970, four of every five people living in poverty in the world have been raised out of it by the spread of capitalism. Meanwhile, centralized control of economies has bankrupted people through unwise spending choices. Ask yourself, how can a man who never earned more than $30,000 per year, micro-manage a 15 trillion dollar economy and do it well? He thinks he can. Do you?